Transitivity performance, relational hierarchy knowledge and awareness: Results of an instructional framing manipulation

The transitive inference (TI) paradigm has been widely used to examine the role of the hippocampus in generalization. Here we consider a surprising feature of experimental findings in this task: the relatively poor transitivity performance and levels of hierarchy knowledge achieved by adult human subjects. We focused on the influence of the task instructions on participants’ subsequent performance—a single-word framing manipulation which either specified the relation between items as transitive (i.e., OLD-FRAME: choose which item is “older”) or left it ambiguous (i.e., NO-FRAME: choose which item is “correct”). We show a marked but highly specific effect of manipulating prior knowledge through instruction: transitivity performance and levels of relational hierarchy knowledge were enhanced, but premise performance unchanged. Further, we show that hierarchy recall accuracy, but not conventional awareness scores, was a significant predictor of inferential performance across the entire group of participants. The current study has four main implications: first, our findings establish the importance of the task instructions, and prior knowledge, in the TI paradigm—suggesting that they influence the size of the overall hypothesis space (e.g., to favor a linear hierarchical structure over other possibilities in the OLD-FRAME). Second, the dissociable effects of the instructional frame on premise and inference performance provide evidence for the operation of distinct underlying mechanisms (i.e., an associative mechanism vs. relational hierarchy knowledge). Third, our findings suggest that a detailed measurement of hierarchy recall accuracy may be a more sensitive index of relational hierarchy knowledge, than conventional awareness score—and should be used in future studies investigating links between awareness and inferential performance. Finally, our study motivates an experimental setting that ensures robust hierarchy learning across participants—therefore facilitating study of the neural mechanisms underlying the learning and representation of linear hierarchies.