Uncovering the processes underlying human category learning

人们普遍认为，复杂的任务可以通过一种“聪明的”内隐或程序性学习机制来学习，这种机制独立于记忆和注意力运行。这一观点对我们理解认知有着重要的启示。如果是真的，在这类任务中提供明确的指导似乎没有什么意义，这样做的努力充其量是浪费时间，在最坏的情况下，是对学习过程的不利影响。这个项目将提供对这一想法的迫切需要的审查，不仅将有助于重新定位我们对如何处理复杂信息的理解，而且还将突出关于数据解释的问题，这些问题对研究和更广泛的社区来说是基础。

There is a pervasive belief that complex tasks can somehow be learned via a 'smart' implicit or procedural learning mechanism, which operates independently of memory and attention. This idea has important implications for our understanding of cognition. If true, there seems little point in providing explicit instruction in such tasks, and efforts to do so are, at best, wasted time and, at worst, detrimental to the learning process. This project will provide much-needed scrutiny of this idea and will help not only to re-orient our understanding of how we deal with complex information, but will also highlight issues about data interpretation that are fundamental for the research and wider communities.