Stimulus familiarity boosts rule abstraction: insights for comparative experiments on pattern perception

Stimulus familiarity boosts rule abstraction: insights for comparative experiments on pattern perception

Andrea Ravignani, and Piera Filippi

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Pattern perception is central in animal communication, including human language. Although much research has investigated this ability across multiple species, the effects of stimuli i) audibility ii) perceptual conspicuousness, and iii) familiarity on the pattern processing for the species at test have often been neglected. These are key methodological aspects to address within comparative experiments on pattern perception across animal species that largely diverge in bio-cognitive apparatuses and ecological habitat. Here we find that sensory familiarity with stimuli affects the degree of cognitive abstraction in pattern learning experiments. When test stimuli are familiar, humans perform above chance in both lower abstraction tests (generalization of an ABnA rule over different elements within A and B categories) and higher abstraction tests (generalization of the ABnA rule over A and B categories). However, when the same structural rule is instantiated over unfamiliar, although clearly perceivable, sounds, humans fail in the high abstraction test, while still succeeding in the lower abstraction test. These findings are crucial to improve comparative research on category, syntax, phonology and concept learning, as well as on analogical reasoning across animal species.