Re-Categorization: Restructuring In Categorization

Re-Categorization: Restructuring In Categorization David G. Cosejo (dcosej1@uic.edu) Justin Oesterreich (joeste1@uic.edu) Stellan Ohlsson (stellan@uic.edu) University of Illinois at Chicago Chicago, IL 60607 USA contradicts those prior concepts? For brevity, we refer to this process as restructuring. Why is restructuring difficult? In the science education context, one plausible hypothesis is that scientific concepts are more complex than common sense ones. The ordinary concept of pulling is simpler than the concept of mutual attraction that underpins mechanics; the concept of mixture is less complex than the chemical concept of dynamic equilibrium ; and so on. Science concepts require attention to more aspects of a situation for correct application. Restructuring in science learning may be difficult because it requires the learner to move from a simpler to a more complex conception. In this paper, we describe an experimental paradigm called re-categorization that allows us to bring restructuring into the laboratory for close-up study. We use a standard categorization paradigm, but change the target category once the participants start responding correctly. Adaptation to the change is stretched out over multiple categorization trials. Also, re-categorization affords experimental control over the relevant prior knowledge because participants learn their ‘misconception’ in the course of the experiment. We describe the re-categorization paradigm in more detail, report an empirical study, highlight the salient features of participants' behavior and discuss what cognitive mechanism may be able to reproduce and explain those features. Our results are consistent with a gradualist conception of the restructuring process. Abstract The process of overriding prior experience and learning – restructuring – was examined within a categorization paradigm. Undergraduate students worked on a modified categorization task in which they learned an initial “misconception” category and later had to restructure their knowledge to acquire a different target category. Participants were able to learn both the misconception and the target category. The data are consistent with the conclusions that participants searched the relevant attribute space in parallel, that negative feedback had little effect, and that the supposedly rejected “misconception” was still affecting behavior at the end of target category training. Keywords: restructuring; categorization; cognitive change. Introduction The world we live in is constantly changing. Changes may be dramatic and large-scale, exemplified by the way Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the way fiscal crises change the global economy. Most changes are smaller and less destructive. We might have to adjust our commute due to changing train schedules, or we might have to learn to use a new computer. At both the global and the mundane scales, our environment is changing and we must change accordingly. There are multiple lines of work in the cognitive sciences that address the issue of adaptation to changing task environments. In the area of skill acquisition, researchers model how people learn to perform unfamiliar tasks through practice (Ohlsson, 2008) and try to measure the mental cost of task switching (Altmann, 2007). In studies of creativity and insight, participants are faced with problems that require them to override their initial task representation (Kershaw & Ohlsson, 2004; Ollinger, Jones & Knoblich, 2006). Educational researchers investigate how to promote conceptual change in science learning (Ohlsson, 2009; Sinatra & Pintrich, 2003). Social psychologists have proposed mechanisms for attitude and belief change (Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006; Petty et al., 2006). The central unsolved theoretical problem is how someone can learn something new that conflicts with what they knew before (Ohlsson, 2009). If new information is understood with the help of already acquired concepts, how, by what cognitive process, can a person acquire information that The Re-Categorization Paradigm During a trial in the standard categorization paradigm, a participant sees a stimulus, predicts whether it is an instance of the category to-be-learned and receives feedback. Trials continue until the category is learned according to some mastery criterion (Ross et al., 2008). The re-categorization paradigm extends this task by incorporating the key feature of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task (WCST), a clinical measure of perseverance: Once the category has been acquired, the experimenter shifts the learning target to another category without telling the participant (Stratta, et al., 1997; Obonsawin, 1999). Responses that were correct before the shift might now be incorrect and vice versa. A re-categorization task thus consists of two phases: First, there is the initial training phase in which participants acquire the initial category ('misconception'). This phase ends with the “behind-the-scenes” shift, and is followed by