The representational glue for incidental category learning is alignment with task-relevant behavior.

Category learning is fundamental to cognition, but little is known about how it proceeds in real-world environments when learners do not have instructions to search for category-relevant information, do not make overt category decisions, and do not experience direct feedback. Prior research demonstrates that listeners can acquire task-irrelevant auditory categories incidentally as they engage in primarily visuomotor tasks. The current study examines the factors that support this incidental category learning. Three experiments systematically manipulated the relationship of four novel auditory categories with a consistent visual feature (color or location) that informed a simple behavioral keypress response regarding the visual feature. In both an in-person experiment and two online replications with extensions, incidental auditory category learning occurred reliably when category exemplars consistently aligned with visuomotor demands of the primary task, but not when they were misaligned. The presence of an additional irrelevant visual feature that was uncorrelated with the primary task demands neither enhanced nor harmed incidental learning. By contrast, incidental learning did not occur when auditory categories were aligned consistently with one visual feature, but the motor response in the primary task was aligned with another, category-unaligned visual feature. Moreover, category learning did not reliably occur across passive observation or when participants made a category-nonspecific, generic motor response. These findings show that incidental learning of categories is strongly mediated by the character of coincident behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Shaping perceptual learning of synthetic speech through feedback.

Listeners exposed to accented speech must adjust how they map between acoustic features and lexical representations such as phonetic categories. A robust form of this adaptive perceptual learning is learning to perceive synthetic speech where the connections between acoustic features and phonetic categories must be updated. Both implicit learning through mere exposure and explicit learning through directed feedback have previously been shown to produce this type of adaptive learning. The present study crosses implicit exposure and explicit feedback with the presence or absence of a written identification task. We show that simple exposure produces some learning, but explicit feedback produces substantially stronger learning, whereas requiring written identification did not measurably affect learning. These results suggest that explicit feedback guides learning of new mappings between acoustic patterns and known phonetic categories. We discuss mechanisms that may support learning via implicit exposure.