The effects of information order and learning mode on schema abstraction

Three experiments investigated the effects of information order and representativeness on schema abstraction in a category learning task. A set of category members, in which the variability and frequency of member types were correlated, was divided into four study samples. In the high-variance condition, each sample was representative of the allowable variation in the category and the frequency with which it occurred. In the low-variance condition, the initial study sample focused only on the most frequently occurring category members. Subsequent samples gradually introduced exemplars, and hence additional variance, from remaining member types. After the fourth study sample, all subjects in all conditions had seen the same category members. Experiment 1 revealed that transfer performance was better if subjects began with a low-variance sample and were gradually introduced to the allowable variation on subsequent samples than if they consistently saw representative samples. Experiments 2 and 3 suggested that this information-order effect may interact with learning mode: Subjects induced to be more analytic about the material performed better if their initial and subsequent samples were representative of the category variation.