Effect of noncontingent “rights” and random reinforcements on concept identification as a function of the relevant dimension’s cue value

Abstract

For the initial six trials of a two-category concept-identification task, Ss were told “right” regardless of their response (R), told “right” and “wrong” randomly (RR), or given no feedback (NF), and the value of the to-be-relevant dimension either remained constant (C) or varied randomly (V). Performance after R and RR was significantly inferior to performance after NF, but R and RR did not differentially retard learning. Neither the C-V factor nor its interaction with type of feedback reached significance. These results were said to be compatible with the idea that Ss use memory to eliminate hypotheses in concept identification.