Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Self-directed learning confers a number of advantages relativeto passive observation, including the ability to test hypothe-ses rather than learn from data generated by the environment.However, it remains unclear to what extent self-directed learn-ing is constrained by basic cognitive processes and how thoselimits are related to the structure of the to-be-learned material.The present study examined how hypothesis generation af-fects the success of self-directed learning of categorical rules.Two experiments manipulated the hypothesis generation pro-cess and assessed its impact on the ability to learn 1D and 2Drules. Performance was strongly influenced by whether thestimulus representation facilitated the generation of hypothe-ses consistent with the target rule. Broadly speaking, the find-ings suggest that the opportunity to actively gather informa-tion is not enough to guarantee successful learning, and thatthe efficacy of self-directed learning closely depends on howhypothesis generation is shaped by the structure of the learn-ing environment.