Collaborator: Abigail Lo
Advisors: Julia Conti (Graduate mentor) and Paulo Carvalho (PI)
This project investigates how learners discover relational rules, focusing on how training structure and worked examples shape strategy production. Using semantic embeddings and topic modeling, we analyzed participants’ verbal explanations across trials to track changes in abstraction and task understanding. Results showed that blocking and interleaving produced broadly similar strategic patterns, but providing examples shifted responses toward simpler, surface-level descriptions. These findings highlight how instructional supports can both guide and constrain relational reasoning. Findings were shared with the lab through a presentation.
