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Poster B in Poster Session B: Tuesday, August 4, 2:00 – 3:45 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Start simple: the benefit of shaping in learning under different cognitive loads

Ti-Fen Pan¹, Anne Collins¹; ¹University of California, Berkeley

Presenter: Ti-Fen Pan

Shaping facilitates complex skill acquisition by decomposing tasks into simpler sub-components. One prominent hypothesis attributes its efficiency to reduced cognitive load, but empirical evidence on how task demand influences the utility of shaping remains limited. This study examined whether shaping enhances learning efficiency and whether its benefits increase with cognitive load. Results showed that shaping promoted the retention of sub-component representations. Contrary to our prediction, we found no increasing effect of load on shaping benefits. Instead, we observed a weak effect at set size 4 but not at set size 6. Computational modeling suggests that this pattern may reflect the adoption of “self-shaping” strategies by participants in the non-shaping group under high cognitive load, thereby attenuating performance differences between groups. These findings highlight the importance of considering individual learning strategies When evaluating the relative effectiveness of shaping and non-shaping training protocols.

Topic Area: Memory, Learning & Knowledge Structures