Transitive Inference as an Intrinsic Process
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Date
2025-02-20
Authors
Murray, Austin
Chaloupka, Ben
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
The present study tests participants’ ability to infer implicit relationships between stimuli by building hierarchical—ranking by some value—relationships, a process known as transitive
inference. For example, if you know person A is taller than person B and person B is taller than person C, you can infer that person A is taller than person C without directly comparing the two. The literature has provided contrasting results regarding whether prior knowledge of the hierarchy is needed for participants to infer the indirect relationships. This study aimed to resolve this discrepancy by investigating whether participants could learn an implicit hierarchy of six art stimuli (A > B > C > D > E > F) without prior knowledge using a transitive inference task (N = 78). After being trained on all pairs of adjacent stimuli in the hierarchy (e.g., A > B or D > E), participants were tested on all possible pairs of stimuli (e.g., A > C or B > F). Participants were able to infer relationships between untrained items two steps apart in the hierarchy (e.g., B > D) just as well as they remembered trained relationships. They were especially successful in judging untrained relationships three steps apart in the hierarchy (e.g., B > E). This suggests that participants were able to generalize across the trained pairs to form the hierarchy, even without prior knowledge of the underlying structure. Our results support the idea that humans possess an intrinsic ability to infer implicit relationships between stimuli.
Description
Austin Murray (murrayau@oregonstate.edu) is a first-year student at Oregon State University majoring in BioHealth Sciences and minoring in Spanish. Austin's research focused on transitive inference and was conducted during his time as a high school intern in the University of Oregon's Brain and Memory Lab. Austin was mentored by UO professor Dr. Dasa Zeithamova and graduate student Benjamin Chaloupka. Austin plans to continue research at Oregon State University and hopes to attend medical school in the future.
Ben Chaloupka (bchaloup@uoregon.edu) is a sixth-year PhD candidate studying cognitive neuroscience in the Brain and Memory Lab at the University of Oregon. He completed his undergraduate training at the University of Illinois at Chicago where he was a research assistant for the UIC Memory Lab. He uses behavioral tasks and fMRI to study how some aspects of overlapping experiences can be leveraged to facilitate new learning, while we mitigate the interference effects of other aspects. Outside of the lab, Ben spends most of his time rock climbing and mountaineering.