Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

An important objective in higher-order cognition research isto understand how relational categories are acquired andapplied. Much of the research on relational category learninghas investigated the role of within-category comparisonopportunities in category acquisition and transfer – guided bypredictions from structure mapping theory that alignmentleads to highlighting and abstraction of shared relationalstructure (Gentner, 1983). Recent research has yielded awithin-category comparison advantage under the supervisedobservational learning mode (relative to twice as many single-item trials), but not under the supervised classification mode(Patterson & Kurtz, 2015). In the present study we investigatethe role that pressure to succeed at the training task – a criticaldifference between the two learning modes – plays in theapparent ineffectiveness of learning by comparison within theclassification mode. In a 2x2 between-subjects design wecrossed two levels of performance pressure (elevated andstandard) with two presentation formats (single-item andwithin-category pairs). The main findings are: (1) asignificant interaction showing a negative impact of increasedperformance pressure for single-item learners, but not forcomparison learners; and (2) a theoretically predicted, butempirically elusive effect of comparison over single-item inthe classification mode. We conclude that: (1) performancepressure exerts a deleterious effect on relational categorylearning (in accord with findings in the attribute categoryliterature) that opportunities to compare may compensate for;and (2) pressure to perform does not appear to underlielackluster comparison + classification performance (relativeto observational learning). Further, we offer new evidence onthe role that within-category comparison plays in relationalcategory learning.