MEASUREMENT-FREE TESTS OF A GENERAL STATE-SPACE MODEL OF PROTOTYPE LEARNING

A general state-space model of prototype learning is formulated which is used to organize and relate several special cases such as Hintzman's (1986) multiple-trace model, Metcalfe-Eich's (1982) holographic model, and connectionistic models (Knapp and Anderson, 1984; McClelland and Rumelhart, 1985). Three basic properties were defined in terms of this general model-linearity, time-invariance, and non-interference. An experiment was conducted using a prototype production task in which subjects were asked to produce a prototypic spectrum after observing a series of random spectral stimuli generated from a common chemical compound. "Measurement free" tests of linearity, originally developed by Krantz (1973), were performed with few assumptions about internal features that subjects may use to encode the stimulus information. The properties of linearity and noninterference were reasonably well supported, but the property of time-invariance was violated in a complex manner. These results corroborate previous findings by Busemeyer and Myung (1988) using more general "measurement free" tests. © 1992.