Global versus Local Consistency: Effects of Degree of Within-Category Consistency on Performance and Learning

We examined the effects of varying degrees of global (higher-order) and local (stimulus specific) consistency on performance and learning in a visual search task. Participants performed a semantic-category, visual search task across 9792 trials of practice. Semantic categories were either completely consistent (all category exemplars served only as targets, never as distractors), completely inconsistent (across trials category exemplars served as both targets and distractors), or partially consistent (25%, 50%, or 75% of the category exemplars served only as targets while the remaining exemplars served as both targets and distractors). Following training, category learning was assessed by examining performance on untrained exemplars of the trained categories. Inconsistency at the category level did not affect detection performance of the consistent exemplars; however, only the completely consistent category-training resulted in statistically significant transfer.

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