The impact of error frequency on errorless and errorful learning of object locations using a novel paradigm

ABSTRACT

Errorless learning (EL) is an approach in which errors are eliminated or reduced as much as possible while learning of new information or skills. In contrast, during trial-and-error???or errorful???learning (TEL) errors are not reduced and are often even promoted. There is a complex and conflicting pattern of evidence whether EL or TEL may result in better memory performance. One major confound in the extant literature is that most EL studies have not controlled for the number of errors made during TEL, resulting in a large variability in the amount of errors committed. This variability likely explains why studies on the cognitive underpinnings of EL and TEL have produced mixed findings. In this study, a novel object-location learning task was employed to examine EL and TEL in 30 healthy young adults. The number of errors was systematically manipulated, allowing us to investigate the impact of frequency of errors on learning outcome. The results showed that recall from memory was significantly better during EL. However, the number of errors made during TEL did not influence the performance in young adults. Altogether, our novel paradigm is promising for measuring EL and TEL, allowing for more accurate analyses to understand the impact of error frequency on a person’s learning ability and style.     

OPTIMAL practice conditions enhance the benefits of gradually increasing error opportunities on retention of a stepping sequence task

IntroductionPhysical therapists should implement practice conditions that promote motor skill learning after neurological injury. Errorful and errorless practice conditions are effective for different populations and tasks. Errorful learning provides opportunities for learners to make task-relevant choices. Enhancing learner autonomy through choice opportunities is a key component of the Optimizing Performance through Intrinsic Motivation and Attention for Learning (OPTIMAL) theory of motor learning. The objective of this study was to evaluate the interaction between error opportunity frequency and OPTIMAL (autonomy-supportive) practice conditions during stepping sequence acquisition in a virtual environment.MethodsForty healthy young adults were randomized to autonomy-supportive or autonomy-controlling practice conditions, which differed in instructional language, focus of attention (external vs internal) and positive versus negative nature of verbal and visual feedback. All participants practiced 40 trials of 4, six-step stepping sequences in a random order. Each of the 4 sequences offered different amounts of choice opportunities about the next step via visual cue presentation (4 choices; 1 choice; gradually increasing [1-2-3-4] choices, and gradually decreasing [4-3-2-1] choices). Motivation and engagement were measured by the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (IMI) and the User Engagement Scale (UES). Participants returned 1–3 days later for retention tests, where learning was measured by time to complete each sequence. No choice cues were offered on retention.ResultsParticipants in the autonomy-supportive group outperformed the autonomy-controlling group at retention on all sequences (mean difference 2.88s, p < .005, t[6835] = 3.42). Participants in both groups had the most difficulty acquiring the decreasing choice (4-3-2-1) sequence (p < .001, t[6835] = −4.26) and performed most poorly on the errorful (4 choice) sequence (p < .034, t[6835] = 2.65) at retention. Participants in the autonomy-supportive group performed best at retention on the increasing choice (1-2-3-4) sequence (p < .033, t[6835] = −2.7). Participants in both groups who reported greater attention to the task on the UES Average Focused Attention subscale during acquisition had poorer retention performance, particularly for the decreasing choice (4-3-2-1) sequence (p < .005, t(6835) = 3.39). Participants in the autonomy-supportive group reported significantly higher overall motivation (p = .007, t(38) = 0.728, d = 0.248) on the IMI as compared to the autonomy-controlling group.ConclusionIndividual benefits of errorless learning and autonomy-supportive practice conditions, with an interaction effect for practice that begins errorless but adds increasing error opportunities over time, suggest that participants relied on implicit learning strategies for this full body task and that feedback about successes minimized errors and reduced their potential information-processing benefits. Subsequent work will continue to examine how assigning a positive versus a negative quality to error provision influences the benefits of errorful learning in a variety of tasks.     

Context effects on orthographic learning of regular and irregular words

The self-teaching hypothesis proposes that orthographic learning takes place via phonological decoding in meaningful texts, that is, in context. Context is proposed to be important in learning to read, especially when decoding is only partial. However, little research has directly explored this hypothesis. The current study looked at the effect of context on orthographic learning and examined whether there were different effects for novel words given regular and irregular pronunciations. Two experiments were conducted using regular and irregular novel words, respectively. Second-grade children were asked to learn eight novel words either in stories or in a list of words. The results revealed no significant effect of context for the regular items. However, in an orthographic decision task, there was a facilitatory effect of context on irregular novel word learning. The findings support the view that contextual information is important to orthographic learning, but only when the words to be learned contain irregular spelling-sound correspondences.     

Word learning is 'smart': evidence that conceptual information affects preschoolers' extension of novel words

We examined electrophysiological correlates of conscious change detection versus change blindness for equivalent displays. Observers had to detect any changes, across a visual interruption, between a pair of successive displays. Each display comprised grey circles on a background of alternate black and white stripes. Foreground changes arose when light-grey circles turned dark-grey and vice-versa. Physically stronger background changes arose when all black stripes turned white and vice-versa. Despite their physical strength, background changes were undetected unless attention was directed to them, whereas foreground changes were invariably seen. Event-related potentials revealed that the P300 component was suppressed for unseen background changes, as compared with the same changes when seen. This effect arose first over frontal sites, and then spread to parietal sites. These results extend recent fMRI findings that fronto-parietal activation is associated with conscious visual change detection, to reveal the timing of these neural correlates.     

记忆的前向测试效应对老年人学习新事物的作用

为检验前置测试是否可以有效地提升老年人学习新事物的能力,参与实验的老年人被随机分为有前置测试的实验组和无前置测试的对照组,在实验1中学习了5列单词,在实验2中记忆了5列日用品,在实验3中学习了4段讲座视频。结果表明,实验组老年人对新事物的记忆成绩均高于对照组的老年人。结论认为,前置测试能够显著提升老年人学习新事物的能力,干扰降低与学习参与相结合的"加减"理论能更好地解释提升老年人记忆的前向测试效应。     

The impact of music on learning and consolidation of novel words

Music can be a powerful mnemonic device, as shown by a body of literature demonstrating that listening to text sung to a familiar melody results in better memory for the words compared to conditions where they are spoken. Furthermore, patients with a range of memory impairments appear to be able to form new declarative memories when they are encoded in the form of lyrics in a song, while unable to remember similar materials after hearing them in the spoken modality. Whether music facilitates the acquisition of completely new information, such as new vocabulary, remains unknown. Here we report three experiments in which adult participants learned novel words in the spoken or sung modality. While we found no benefit of musical presentation on free recall or recognition memory of novel words, novel words learned in the sung modality were more strongly integrated in the mental lexicon compared to words learned in the spoken modality. This advantage for the sung words was only present when the training melody was familiar. The impact of musical presentation on learning therefore appears to extend beyond episodic memory and can be reflected in the emergence and properties of new lexical representations.     

Interfering neighbours: the impact of novel word learning on the identification of visually similar words

We assessed the impact of visual similarity on written word identification by having participants learn new words (e.g. BANARA) that were neighbours of familiar words that previously had no neighbours (e.g. BANANA). Repeated exposure to these new words made it more difficult to semantically categorize the familiar words. There was some evidence of interference following an initial training phase, and clear evidence of interference the following day (without any additional training); interference was larger still following more training on the second day. These findings lend support to models of reading that include lexical competition as a key process.     

Domain effects in lexical development: learning words for foods and toys

We investigated 3-year-olds’ and adults’ use of domain cues in learning words for solid and nonsolid material entities. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants heard a novel neutral noun (e.g., “my X”) for a standard solid or nonsolid entity described as either a toy or a food. They then were asked to extend the word to one of two other entities. Both options matched the standard in solidity; but one differed from it in an object-relevant property (shape) and the other in a substance-relevant property (color, texture, or smell). Both children and adults were more likely to select the same-shaped entity if the standard was (1) solid than if it was nonsolid, and (2) described as a toy than if it was described as a food. Their interpretations of novel words for material entities were thus affected not only by perceptual information (about solidity) but also by conceptual information (about domain). In Experiment 3, the novel noun was presented in a syntactic context that suggested the solid entity should be interpreted as an object (e.g., “an X”) and that the nonsolid entity should be interpreted as a substance (e.g., “some X”). For adults, these changes largely eliminated the effect of the entity’s domain (toy, food) on interpretation. We interpret these findings in terms of the proposal that domain cues, like solidity cues, furnish information about whether an entity’s structure should be thought of as arbitrary or nonarbitrary and, hence, about whether a word should be interpreted as naming an object or a substance construal.     

Producing and recognizing words with two pronunciation variants: Evidence from novel schwa words

This study examined the lexical representations and psycholinguistic mechanisms underlying the production and recognition of novel words with two pronunciation variants in French. Participants first learned novel schwa words (e.g., /??nyk/), which varied in their alternating status (i.e., whether these words were learned with one or two variants) and, for alternating words, in the frequency of their variants. They were then tested in picture-naming (free or induced) and recognition memory tasks (i.e., deciding whether spoken items were learned during the experiment or not). Results for free naming show an influence of variant frequency on responses, more frequent variants being produced more often. Moreover, our data show an effect of the alternating status of the novel words on naming latencies, with longer latencies for alternating than for nonalternating novel words. These induced naming results suggest that both variants are stored as lexical entries and compete during the lexeme selection process. Results for recognition show an effect of variant frequency on reaction times and no effect of variant type (i.e., schwa versus reduced variant). Taken together, our findings suggest that participants both comprehend and produce novel French schwa words using two lexical representations, one for each variant.     

The role of inferences about referential intent in word learning: evidence from autism

Young children are readily able to use known labels to constrain hypotheses about the meanings of new words under conditions of referential ambiguity. At issue is the kind of information children use to constrain such hypotheses. According to one theory, children take into account the speaker's intention when solving a referential puzzle. In the present studies, children with autism were impaired in monitoring referential intent, but were equally successful as normally developing 24-month-old toddlers at mapping novel words to unnamed items under conditions of referential ambiguity. Therefore, constraints that lead the child to map a novel label to a previously unnamed object under these circumstances are not solely based on assessments of speakers' intentions.     

Use of phonetic specificity during the acquisition of new words: differences between consonants and vowels

The present study explores the issue of the use of phonetic specificity in the process of learning new words at 20 months of age. The procedure used follows Nazzi and Gopnik [Nazzi, T., & Gopnik, A. (2001). Linguistic and cognitive abilities in infancy: When does language become a tool for categorization? Cognition, 80, B11-B20]. Infants were first presented with triads of perceptually dissimilar objects, which were given made-up names, two of the objects receiving the same name. Then, word learning was evaluated through object selection/categorization. Tests involved phonetically different words (e.g. [pize] vs. [mora], Experiment 1), words differing minimally on their onset consonant (e.g. [pize] vs. [tize], Experiment 2a), and conditions which had never been tested before: non-initial consonantal contrasts (e.g. [pide] vs. [pige], Experiment 2b), and vocalic contrasts (e.g. [pize] vs. [pyze]; [pize] vs. [paze]; [pize] vs. [pizu], Experiments 3a-c). Results differed across conditions: words could be easily learnt in the phonetically different condition, and were learnt, though to a lesser degree, in both the initial and non-initial minimal consonant contrast; however, infants' global performance on all three vocalic contrasts was at chance level. The present results shed new light regarding the specificity of early words, and raise the possibility of different contributions for vowels and consonants in early word learning.     

Novel word integration in the mental lexicon: Evidence from unmasked and masked semantic priming

We sought to establish whether novel words can become integrated into existing semantic networks by teaching participants new meaningful words and then using these new words as primes in two semantic priming experiments, in which participants carried out a lexical decision task to familiar words. Importantly, at no point in training did the novel words co-occur with the familiar words that served as targets in the primed lexical decision task, allowing us to evaluate semantic priming in the absence of direct association. We found that familiar words were primed by the newly related novel words, both when the novel word prime was unmasked (Experiment 1) and when it was masked (Experiment 2), suggesting that the new words had been integrated into semantic memory. Furthermore, this integration was strongest after a 1-week delay and was independent of explicit recall of the novel word meanings: Forgetting of meanings did not attenuate priming. We argue that even after brief training, newly learned words become an integrated part of the adult mental lexicon rather than being episodically represented separately from the lexicon.     

The emergence of words: attentional learning in form and meaning

Children improve at word learning during the 2nd year of life—sometimes dramatically. This fact has suggested a change in mechanism, from associative learning to a more referential form of learning. This article presents an associative exemplar-based model that accounts for the improvement without a change in mechanism. It provides a unified account of children's growing abilities to (a) learn a new word given only 1 or a few training trials ("fast mapping"); (b) acquire words that differ only slightly in phonological form; (c) generalize word meanings preferentially along particular dimensions, such as object shape (the "shape bias"); and (d) learn 2nd labels for already-named objects, despite a persisting resistance to doing so ("mutual exclusivity"). The model explains these improvements in terms of increased attention to relevant aspects of form and meaning, which reduces memory interference. The interaction of associations and reference in word learning is discussed.     

Evidence for an illusion of causality when using the Implicit Association Test to measure learning

Our ability to detect causal relations and patterns of covariation is easily biased by a number of well-known factors. For example, people tend to overestimate the strength of the relation between a cue and an outcome if the outcome tends to occur very frequently. During the last years, several accounts have attempted to explain the outcome-density bias. On the one hand, dual-process performance accounts propose that biases are not due to the way associations are encoded, but to the higher-order cognitive processes involved in the retrieval and use of this information. In other words, the outcome-density bias is seen as a performance effect, not a learning effect. From this point of view, it is predicted that the outcome-density bias should be absent in any testing procedure that reduces the motivation or opportunity to engage in higher-order cognitive processes. Contrary to this prediction, but consistent with the most common single-process learning accounts, our results show that the outcome-density effect can be detected when the Implicit Association Test is used to measure the strength of cue–outcome associations.     

Positional character frequency and word spacing facilitate the acquisition of novel words during Chinese children's reading

Children's eye movements were recorded to examine the role of word spacing and positional character frequency on the process of Chinese lexical acquisition during reading. Three types of two-character novel pseudowords were constructed: words containing characters in positions in which they frequently occurred (congruent), words containing characters in positions they do not frequently occur in (incongruent) and words containing characters that do not have a strong position bias (balanced). There were two phases within the experiment, a learning phase and a test phase. There were also two learning groups: half the children read sentences in a word-spaced format and the other half read the sentences in an unspaced format during the learning phase. All the participants read normal, unspaced text at test. A benefit of word spacing was observed in the learning phase, but not at test. Also, facilitatory effects of positional character congruency were found both in the learning and test phase; however, this benefit was greatly reduced at test. Furthermore, we did not find any interaction between word spacing and positional character frequencies, indicating that these two types of cues affect lexical acquisition independently. With respect to theoretical accounts of lexical acquisition, we argue that word spacing might facilitate the very earliest stages of word learning by clearly demarking word boundary locations. In contrast, we argue that characters' positional frequencies might affect relatively later stages of word learning.     

Becoming a written word: Eye movements reveal order of acquisition effects following incidental exposure to new words during silent reading

We know that from mid-childhood onwards most new words are learned implicitly via reading; however, most word learning studies have taught novel items explicitly. We examined incidental word learning during reading by focusing on the well-documented finding that words which are acquired early in life are processed more quickly than those acquired later. Novel words were embedded in meaningful sentences and were presented to adult readers early (day 1) or later (day 2) during a five-day exposure phase. At test adults read the novel words in semantically neutral sentences. Participants’ eye movements were monitored throughout exposure and test. Adults also completed a surprise memory test in which they had to match each novel word with its definition. Results showed a decrease in reading times for all novel words over exposure, and significantly longer total reading times at test for early than late novel words. Early-presented novel words were also remembered better in the offline test. Our results show that order of presentation influences processing time early in the course of acquiring a new word, consistent with partial and incremental growth in knowledge occurring as a function of an individual’s experience with each word.     

Exploring the effect of testing on forgetting in vocabulary learning: an examination of the bifurcation model

ABSTRACT

Research on the testing effect demonstrated a stronger decrease in performance for repeated studying compared to repeated testing. The bifurcation model attributes this test-delay interaction to different distributions of item memory strength. The present study tested the assumptions of the bifurcation model for learning foreign language vocabulary. We hypothesised an elimination or reduction of the interaction in a test/feedback condition because feedback prevents the bifurcation of item memory strength. Our experiment based on a 3 (Learning Method within: Test, test/feedback, copy)?×?3 (Retention Interval between: Immediate, 1-week, 2-weeks) mixed factorial design with a sample of N = 122. The greatest long-term retention was achieved in the test/feedback condition. The bifurcation model was supported by a reduced test-delay interaction for the test/feedback condition. Further evidence for the bifurcation model is needed as interpretations on the dropout rates of items with different recall success were limited due to a floor effect.     

Looking is not enough: Multimodal attention supports the real-time learning of new words

Most research on early language learning focuses on the objects that infants see and the words they hear in their daily lives, although growing evidence suggests that motor development is also closely tied to language development. To study the real-time behaviors required for learning new words during free-flowing toy play, we measured infants’ visual attention and manual actions on to-be-learned toys. Parents and 12-to-26-month-old infants wore wireless head-mounted eye trackers, allowing them to move freely around a home-like lab environment. After the play session, infants were tested on their knowledge of object-label mappings. We found that how often parents named objects during play did not predict learning, but instead, it was infants’ attention during and around a labeling utterance that predicted whether an object-label mapping was learned. More specifically, we found that infant visual attention alone did not predict word learning. Instead, coordinated, multimodal attention–when infants’ hands and eyes were attending to the same object–predicted word learning. Our results implicate a causal pathway through which infants’ bodily actions play a critical role in early word learning.     

The explicit learning of new names for known objects is improved by dexamphetamine

A randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled, between subjects study design (N=37) was used to investigate the effects of dexamphetamine on explicit new name learning. Participants ingested 10mg of dexamphetamine or placebo daily over 5 consecutive mornings before learning new names for 50 familiar objects plus fillers. The dexamphetamine group recognised and recalled the new names more accurately than the placebo group over the 5 days and 1 month later. Word learning success was not associated with baseline neuropsychological performance, mood, cardiovascular arousal, or sustained attention. These results may have implications for the pharmacological treatment of acquired naming difficulties.     

Filling in the gaps: using testing and restudy to promote associative learning

Although testing has been shown to potentiate subsequent learning [Izawa, C. (1966). Reinforcement-test sequences in paired-associate learning. Psychological Reports, 18, 879–919.], the mechanisms that influence this effect are not entirely understood. The present research examined the relationship between associative binding and test-potentiation effects. We hypothesised that test-potentiation effects would be most pronounced when participants could easily extract the relationship among word groupings. Towards that end, we compared three-word groupings, or triads, that were either semantically related or unrelated. Participants engaged in repeated study, repeated testing, or engaged in interpolated study and test prior to a final test. Final test performance was greatest for participants who engaged in interpolated study and test on related triads. The results support three primary conclusions: (1) testing aids in associative binding; (2) associative binding is facilitated by retrieval practice and restudy pairings; and (3) pre-existing associations facilitate test-potentiation effects.