ECONOMY OF REPRESENTATION AND REVERSAL SHIFT BEHAVIOR

Two experiments sought to investigate the influence the number of words in a representational response has upon the speed of reversal learning. In Exp. I an attempt was made to control the length of the representational response by varying the number of words (2, 4, 8, or 20) in each of the two sorting categories. The expectation was that the representational response for Ss sorting related (R) words, instances from the same natural-language conceptual category, would consist of one word (e.g., clothing) regardless of the number of items in the category. In contrast the size of the representational response for Ss sorting categories of unrelated (U) words was expected to be proportional to the number of words in each category. Although the results indicated that a reversal shift was executed more rapidly with R-as compared to U-words, no significant interaction effect was obtained between the relatedness of words and the number of items in each sorting category. In Exp. II the sorting categories consisted of the same number (20) of words but different numbers (1, 2, 5, and 10) of concepts. The expectation was that the size of the representational response would be proportional to the number of concepts within each sorting category. The results were consistent with the hypothesis that the more economical a representational response is, the more effective that response will be in mediating reversal learning. © 1969 Academic Press Inc. All rights reserved.