Interaction of Cue Saliency, Stimulus Unitization and Familiarization in Concept Identification : Attention or Memory Phenomenon?

The effects of cue saliency, stimulus unitization and familiarization on the number of errors to criterion in some concept identification tasks were studied. Cue saliency, familiarization, and their interaction had significant effects. Further analysis showed that cue saliency was only effective in the first concept problem (no pretaining was given) with nonunitized stimulus material. The overall effect of cue saliency appeared when the salient dimension was irrelevant as well as when it was relevant, and prediction of second task performance on the basis of the first task performance according to an additivity of cues model failed. These results were interpreted as evidence against the additivity of cues hypothesis and the selective attention view of concept learning. The findings are shown to confirm the hypothesis that information processing during concept learning is principally guided by memory operations.