Stimulus-Rule Interaction in Concept Learning
Lyle E. Bourne · The American Journal of Psychology · 1979
The acquisition and use of conceptual or categorical rules has heretofore been treated theoretically as a stimulus-independent process, involving the establishment of mental procedures that are equally applicable to any collection of stimulus attributes or within any stimulus population. The results of two experiments are inconsistent with this principle, at least for subjects who are relatively naive in the use of logical rules. The procedures that subjects employ initially, and therefore the relative difficulty of conjunctive and disjunctive rules, depend on the pair of attributes integrated by the rule in any concrete concept problem. The differences among attribute pairs reflect an underlying variable identified as local integrality. Integrable attributes conduce to conjunctive procedures, and separable attributes conduce to disjunctive procedures.