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Abstract:
Do mental representations change in an adaptive way? Broadly, previous theories assume that each encounter with a stimulus leads to a separate episode being stored or that encoding a stimulus several times leads to a more complete and perhaps less error-prone representation of the stimulus. In contrast, we suggest that representations change in an adaptive way. Our theory assumes that a sensory representation is a noisy version of a presented stimulus and
only stored in memory if it is helpful to achieve the current task goal. We test qualitative predictions, derived from a computational implementation of that theory, in an experiment in which participants learn
to categorize two-dimensional stimuli into two categories. In short, the theory predicts that representations are attracted by the category centers and repulsed by the category boundaries. We measure participants’ representations in a continuous-reproduction task before the categorization task as a baseline and after the categorization task to examine representational change. The results are not in line with the qualitative predictions. We discuss problems with the experiment and
potential adjustments to the experimental design to further test the theory.
