Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When people make decisions, these often do not stand alone but are made in a sequence of decisions. For instance, a doctor will first decide on a patient's treatment and then about the duration of the treatment, such that later decisions frequently depend on the outcome of the first decision. While there is research on how humans discover inter-relations between sequentially presented information (e.g., grammar), little is known about learning complex inter-category relations in decision sequences. Hence, we present an experiment in which we embedded an Exclusive-Or (Type-II) structure, as known in category learning, in a sequence of three categorization tasks where the outcomes of tasks 1 and 2 predicted the outcome of task 3. We hypothesized that embedded structure would facilitate learning and generalization compared to sequence without regularity. Instead, the evidence favored the Null hypothesis in both cases, contrasting with the findings in the visual categorization domain.