Are Representations Shaped by Task-Specific Goals?

Do mental representations change in an adaptive way? Broadly, previous theories assume that each encounter with a stimulus leads to a separate episode being stored or that encoding the same stimulus several times leads to a more complete and perhaps less error-prone representation of the stimulus. In contrast, we suggest a theory that predicts that representations change in an adaptive way. The theory assumes that a sensory representation is a noisy version of a presented stimulus and only stored in memory if it is helpful to achieve the current task goal. We test qualitative predictions of that theory in an experiment in which participants learn to categorize two-dimensional stimuli into two categories. In short, the theory predicts that representations are attracted by the category centers and repulsed by the category boundaries. We measure participants’ representations in a continuous-reproduction task before the categorization task as a baseline and after the categorization task to examine representational change. The data collected so far deviate from the qualitative predictions. We discuss issues with regards to the experimental design and potential changes to it to further test the theory