Categorization and Working Memory: Bridging two Pillars of Cognition

分类是一项基本的认知技能，它构成了许多专家行为的基础，包括医学诊断。一项特定的任务往往会导致不同个体之间的战略差异很大，有缺陷的战略可能会导致专家(例如丛林消防员)的预测错误。这个项目试图通过将工作记忆表现与分类联系起来，找出决定个体策略习得的潜在变量。工作记忆是一个被广泛理解的核心认知结构，但它与类别学习的关系到目前为止还没有被研究过。能够预测分类策略的发展有助于最大限度地提高专家绩效。

Categorization is a fundamental cognitive skill that underlies much expert behavior, including medical diagnosis. A given task often gives rise to widely divergent strategies across individuals, and flawed strategies have been implicated in prediction errors of experts (e.g., bush fire fighters). This project seeks to identify the underlying variables that determine an individual's strategy acquisition by relating working memory performance to categorization. Working memory is a core cognitive construct that is quite well understood, but its relationship to category learning has so far remained unexplored. Being able to predict the development of categorization strategies can help maximize expert performance.