SELECTION THROUGH REJECTION - RECONSIDERING THE INVARIANT LEARNING-PARADIGM

Two experiments are reported that investigate the nature of selections in the McGeorge and Burton (1990) invariant learning paradigm. McGeor ge and Burton suggest that subjects implicitly acquire abstract knowle dge of an invariant feature (usually the presence of the digit ''3'') in a set of 30 stimuli. McGeorge and Burton's analysis has recently be en challenged by Cock, Berry, and Gaffan (1994) and by Wright and Burt on (1995). In this paper, we demonstrate that performance is based on knowledge of other aspects of the learning set besides the invariant d igit, but that this knowledge is still implicit. Altering the nature o f the learning stimuli to highlight these co-varying features enhances the effects and increases the reporting of explicit knowledge. Our re sults indicate that performance within this paradigm is more easily ch aracterized as rejection of salient negatives than selection of positi ve instances, but that salience is not based simply on similarity.