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It seems self-evident to me that if you present humans with a set of novel stimuli, giving them a 'vocabulary' for the configuration of the stimuli would help t
by cwkoss 7y ago
It seems self-evident to me that if you present humans with a set of novel stimuli, giving them a 'vocabulary' for the configuration of the stimuli would help them remember the configuration more durably.
Ex. sets of 3 blocks of various colors are presented to subjects. Either the experimenter gives a 'control lecture' showing possible upcoming sets and they just list the colors, or they teach the subject a name for each of the possible sets - gibberish like 'flurback' and 'orshwalg'. Present a list of sets, spending the same amount of time 'discussing' each set with each set - either with or without using names.
I would predict the 'names' group would significantly outperform in long-term memory formation of which sets were shown in which order.
- godelski 7y agoAnother good example I heard is with colors. Different languages have different words for colors, blue being a specifically unmentioned one in Greek. So if you're calling the sea "wine-red" and the sky white, it just makes sense that you would compare other similar colors with the limited set of categories you have. I mean it seems easy to simulate. You set up a classifier to classify colors but leave out blue. Sure, it is going to poorly predict blues and misclassify them as things like reds, whites, or greens, but isn't that what SW predicts?