The development of a general associative learning account of skill acquisition in a relative arrival-time judgment task

Current theory assumes that individuals only use information from the immediate environment to perform relative arrival-time judgment tasks. This article presents a theoretical analysis of the memory requirements of this task. The authors present an analysis of the inputs to the memory system and the processes that map those inputs onto outputs. The analysis generates a set of predictions regarding the specificity of transfer and the role of context during learning. In 3 experiments, participants decided whether pairs of aircraft would violate a minimum separation standard or pass each other safely. Participants were presented with pairs of aircraft in which properties of the pair varied along 3 structural and 3 surface dimensions. Contexts were defined by the co-occurrence of specific values along stimulus dimensions and the use of a neutral label. The results suggest that transfer was limited by the dimensions that were varied in training and the context in which those dimensions were varied. The discussion focuses on the problems that complex tasks like relative judgment pose for associative learning mechanisms and the development of precise models of cognition.