On the learnability of auditory concepts

• Published in: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 2013-11, Vol.134 (5_Supplement), p.4064-4064
• Main Authors: Vigo, Ronaldo, Barcus, Mikayla, Zhang, Yu, Doan, Charles
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0001-4966; 1520-8524
• DOI: 10.1121/1.4830836

The field of categorization and concept learning research has been dominated by findings involving visual stimuli. Among these findings is the learning difficulty ordering of the family of category structures associated with visual categorical stimuli consisting of four objects defined over three dimensions. This ordering has been observed numerous times in several rigorous studies (Kruschke, 1992; Love et al., 2004; Nosofsky et al., 1994; Shepard et al., 1961; Vigo, 2011a, 2013a. 2013b) and has been influential in shaping current theories of conceptual behavior. In recent work, we have freed the field from this visual bias by examining the learnability of auditory categorical stimuli that are instances of the aforementioned structures. We found that, in general, for auditory categorical stimuli the learning difficulty ordering of these structures is somewhat different from that of their visual counterparts. However, we also found that this difference may be explained and accurately predicted by a simple encoding mechanism proposed in generalized invariance structure theory (GIST; Vigo, 2013b). We view this result as evidence in support of the proposition that a single basic conceptual system underlies the acquisition of both auditory and visual concepts.