| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
Systematicity is a cognitive property whereby the capacity for certain cognitive abilities implies the capacity for certain other (structurally related) cognitive abilities. Yet, this property is not always present. The challenge is to explain both presence and absence of systematicity. Theoretically, we explained systematicity in terms of the category theory concept of universal constructions (Phillips & Wilson, 2016) which applied to learning (Phillips & Wilson, 2016b), language-like capacity in bird calls (Phillips & Wilson, 2016c), and visual attention (Phillips & Takeda, in press). Experimentally, we tested a theoretical implication that failure of systematicity results from derives from a cost/benefit trade-off for the universal construction. Participants learned two series of cue-target (character-shape) pair maps whose underlying structures were either products (universal construction), or non-products (control). Each series was learned in either ascending or descending order of size: number of unique cue/target elements constituting pairs, which varied from three to six. Only performance on the product series was affected by order: systematicity was obtained universally in the descend group, but only on large sets in the ascend group. Consistent with the theory, the results suggest that learning small maps directly, without reference to the underlying product, may be perceived as more cost-effective, i.e., acquisition of a universal construction, hence systematicity, depends on an empirical cost-benefit trade-off (Phillips, Takeda, & Sugimoto, 2016, 2017).
|
