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Poster D in Poster Session D: Wednesday, August 5, 2:00 – 3:45 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

One-Shot category learning and memory in human adults

Anna Krey¹, Vladislav Ayzenberg¹; ¹Temple University

Presenter: Anna Krey

In contrast to artificial neural networks (ANNs), which often require large numbers of examples to learn a new visual concept, humans can infer the existence of a category after seeing as little as one object exemplar. Yet, despite its importance, few studies have examined how robustly humans form one-shot categories for naturalistic 3D objects and how strongly these representations persist in memory. Here, we examined participants’ capacity to incidentally learn a novel stimulus category embedded in a stream of images, and then generalize that category to novel exemplars after a delay. Importantly, participants were shown each category exemplar just once and were not told whether they would be tested on it later. We found that participants accurately categorized novel objects after previously seeing just one example. Moreover, categorization accuracy for novel objects did not vary as a function of the delay between the example and test. These findings suggest that humans have robust category learning abilities, such that they can learn a new category while passively viewing many images, and their learning persists after a short delay.

Topic Area: Memory, Learning & Knowledge Structures