Faculty of Education - Theses

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End date: 1991 × Subject: Concept learning × Subject: Learning, Psychology of ×

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    Restricted conjunctive concept attainment
    Gardner, P. L ( 1970)
    A restricted conjunctive concept is defined by the joint presence of a number of relevant attribute values and the absence of another attribute value. Such concepts are relevant to scientific generalizations. Three series of experiments were performed. Experiments IA, IB, and IC were designed to investigate the relative difficulties of restricted conjunctive concepts and conjunctive concepts, using Neisser and Weene type nonsense syllables as stimuli. Ss found the restricted conjunctive concept slightly more difficult to attain; time to solution for the restricted conjunctive concept was significantly higher. In Experiment II, the effects of three factors upon restricted conjunctive concept attainment were investigated: presentation sequence,in which positive, negative, and restricted, instances were presented in different orders. . amount of irrelevant information, in which stimuli varied in the amount of irrelevant information they contained. instructional conditions, in which Ss were given no hints ("complete learning"), hints about the nature of the rule, ("attribute identification"), hints about the relevant attributes ("rule learning"). A 3-factor anova design was used; only presentation sequence was a significant source of variance. Experiment III was a study of a scientific restricted conjunctive concept. Diagrams representing objects, with symbols representing force, distance, angle, time and speed, were used to define a restricted conjunctive concept. A 3-factor anova design was used to investigate the effects of the same factors. As in Experiment II, presentation sequence was a significant source of variance; unlike Experiment II, irrelevant information was a highly significant source of variance. Experiments II and III provided data which were used to test the one-element Markov ("all-or-none") model of concept learning. Tests of the binomial distributions of four-tuples and stationarity could not reject this model. When the strings of responses were Vincentized, the model still could not be rejected for the data of Experiment II, but was clearly rejected for the data of Experiment III. A two-element (three-state) model might account for the data of both experiments, but this was not tested statistically.