Distribution-dependent representations in auditory category learning and generalization

A fundamental objective in Auditory Sciences is understanding how people learn to generalize auditory category knowledge in new situations. How we generalize to novel scenarios speaks to the nature of emergent category representations and generalization mechanisms in handling perceptual variabilities and novelty. The dual learning system (DLS) models propose that auditory category learning involves an explicit, hypothesis-testing learning system, which is optimal for learning rule-based (RB) categories, and an implicit, procedural-based learning system, which is optimal for learning categories requiring pre-decisional information integration (II) across acoustic dimensions. Although DLS describes distinct mechanisms of two types of category learning, it is yet clear the nature of acquired representations and how we transfer them to new contexts. Here, we conducted three experiments to examine differences between II and RB category representations by examining what acoustic and perceptual variabilities affect learners’ generalization success. Learners can generalize to different sets of untrained sounds after only eight training blocks for both II and RB categories. The category structures and novel contexts differentially modulated the generalization success. The II learners significantly decreased generalization performances when categorizing new items derived from an untrained perceptual area and in a context with more distributed samples. In contrast, RB learners’ generalizations are resistant to changes in perceptual regions but are sensitive to changes in sound dispersity. Representational similarity modeling revealed that the generalization in the more dispersed sampling context was accomplished differently by II and RB learners. II learners increased representations of perceptual similarity and decision distance to compensate for the decreased transfer of category representations, whereas the RB learners used a more computational cost strategy by default, computing the decision-bound distance to guide generalization decisions. These results suggest that distinct representations emerged after learning the two types of category structures and using different strategies and flexible mechanisms in resolving generalization challenges when facing novel perceptual variability in new contexts. These findings provide new evidence for dissociated representations of auditory categories and reveal novel generalization mechanisms in resolving different variabilities to maintain perceptual constancy.