Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous work has demonstrated that relational responding in the Relational Match-to-Sample (RMTS) task can be improved compared to baseline by providing people with the opportunity to consider individual problem elements in isolation prior to receiving the full problem. However, it remains unclear whether the benefits of this intervention persist in its absence, or can be observed when a prior strategy has already been established to complete the task. To this end, we deployed a 2x2 mixed design, where presentation type was the within-subjects factor and order of presentation type was the between-subjects factor. The aims of this work were to gain further insight into the utility of isolated-focus as a means of promoting relational responding, and better understanding how processing of problem elements changes as a consequence of isolated-focus. We discuss the implications for pedagogical practices and extensions of this work to other materials and tasks.