In function learning, the to-be-learned function always defines
the relationships between stimulus and response. However,
when a function defines the stimuli by time points, we can call
this type of function as time-varying function. Learning timevarying
function would be different from learning other ones.
Specifically, the correlation between successive stimuli should
play an important role in learning such functions. In this study,
three experiments were conducted with the correlations as positive
high, negative high, and positive low. The results show
people perform well when the correlation between successive
stimuli is high, no matter whether it is positive or negative.
Also, people have difficulty learning the time-varying function
with a low correlation between successive stimuli. A simple
two-layered neural network model is evident to be able to provide
good accounts for the data of all experiments. These results
suggest that learning time varying function is based on
association between successive stimuli.