Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

To be efficient, both active learners and teachers need to be able to judge the relative usefulness of a piece of information for themselves or for their students, respectively. The current study assessed whether experience of active learning facilitates subsequent teaching from imperfect knowledge. Following a visual category learning task, dyads (N=40) of active and yoked passive learners taught (imagined) naive learners how to categorize the same visual stimuli by providing them with a small number of self-generated examples. Active learners narrowed down the possible categorization boundaries more than yoked learners. However, the active learning advantage was modest and limited to categories that were more difficult to learn and, overall, teachers were overly conservative, providing the least ambiguous category examples.