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Abstract:
Research from several areas suggests that mental representations adapt to the specific tasks we carry out in our environment. In this study, we propose a new mechanism of adaptive representational change, task imprinting. Thereby, we introduce a computational model, which portrays task imprinting as an adaptation to specific task goals via selective storage of helpful representations in long-term memory. We test the main qualitative prediction of the model in four behavioral experiments using healthy young adults as participants. In each experiment, we assess participants’ baseline representations in the beginning of the experiment, then expose participants to one of two tasks intended to shape representations differently according to our model, and finally assess any potential change in representations. Across the four experiments, we vary the measurement level of mental representations. We use a continuous reproduction task to measure visual-perceptual representations, pairwise comparison judgments to measure perceived similarities between stimuli, and pairwise category comparison judgments to measure differences between task-specific representations. The results suggest that representational change is task-specific. That is, it is not the low-level representation of an object, which changes when we practice a task, but rather a task-specific interpretation of that object. The results align with recent findings that performance improvements due to task practice do not generalize broadly over and above the specific task practiced.
