Value-directed learning: Schematic reward structure facilitates learning

When learning, it is often necessary to identify important themes to organize key concepts into categories. In value-directed remembering tasks, words are paired with point values to communicate item importance, and participants prioritize high-value words over low-value words, demonstrating selective memory. In the present study, we paired values with words based on category membership to examine whether being selective in this task would lead to a transfer of learning of the “schematic reward structure” of the lists with task experience. Participants studied lists of words paired with numeric values corresponding to the categories the words belonged to and were asked to assign a value to novel exemplars from the studied categories on a final test. In Experiment 1, instructions about the schematic structure of the lists were manipulated between participants to either explicitly inform participants about the list categories or to offer more general instructions about item importance. The presence of a visible value cue during encoding was also manipulated between participants such that participants either studied the words paired with visible value cues or studied them alone. Results revealed a benefit of both explicit schema instructions and visible value cues for learning, and this persisted even after a short delay. In Experiment 2, participants had fewer study trials and received no instructions about the schematic structure of the lists. Results showed that participants could learn the schematic reward structure with fewer study trials, and value cues enhanced adaptation to new themes with task experience.