ArticleMemory & cognition2019
Breaking the perceptual-conceptual barrier: Relational matching and working memory.
Article in Memory & cognition, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Linking Subclinical Autistic Traits and Perceptual Category Learning.The European journal of neuroscience · 2025Article
- Article
- Conceptual anchoring dissociates implicit and explicit category learning.Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition · 2022Article
- Two-item conditional same-different categorization in pigeons: Finding differences.Journal of experimental psychology. Animal learning and cognition · 2021Article
- A Dissociative Framework for Understanding Same-Different Conceptualization.Current opinion in behavioral sciences · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Cognitive, comparative, and developmental psychologists have long been interested in humans' and animals' ability to respond to abstract relations, as this ability may underlie important capacities like analogical reasoning. Cross-species research has used relational matching-to-sample (RMTS) tasks in which participants try to find stimulus pairs that "match" because they both express the same abstract relation (same or different). Researchers seek to understand the cognitive processes that underlie successful matching performance. In the present RMTS paradigm, the abstract-relational cue was made redundant with a first-order perceptual cue. Then the perceptual cue faded, requiring participants to transition from a perceptual to a conceptual approach by realizing the task's abstract-relational affordance. We studied participants' ability to make this transition with and without a working-memory load. The concurrent load caused participants to fail to break the perceptual-conceptual barrier unless the load was abandoned. We conclude that finding the conceptual solution depends on reconstruing the task using cognitive processes that are especially reliant on working memory. Our data provide the closest existing look at this cognitive reorganization. They raise important theoretical issues for cross-species comparisons of relational cognition, especially regarding animals' limitations in this domain.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.