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Poster E in Poster Session E: Thursday, August 6, 10:30 am – 12:15 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Different cognitive phenotypes in multi-level learning

Silke Boulanger¹, Junwu Chen¹, Senne Braem¹; ¹Universiteit Gent

Presenter: Silke Boulanger

Humans can learn at multiple levels of abstraction, but it is unclear whether most learners learn these in parallel or adopt more idiosyncratic, level-specific strategies. We developed Cosmic Connections, a gamified four‑armed bandit task that simultaneously rewards response‑based, stimulus dimension‑based, and voluntary switch‑based contingencies. Across 38 participants, average reward rate gradually increased over time, with average choice behavior suggesting a primary reliance on the response contingencies. However, individual difference analyses in task performance and strategy reports revealed distinct ‘cognitive phenotypes’, with some people showing strong prioritization of simpler response-level contingencies, while others relied more on dimension-level information, or a combination of both. Together, our findings indicate that most learners do not uniformly integrate multi-level contingencies, even when all contingencies are able to be learned in parallel.

Topic Area: Development, Individual Differences & Clinical Populations