B - 115 How Training Conditions Impact Performance on a Theoretically-Derived Learning Instrument

Abstract Objective Few neuropsychological measures were developed using an explicit theory that accounts for individual performance. We developed a novel associative learning measure to address this limitation and investigated whether training conditions could influence accuracy and response time. Methods Fifty young, community-dwelling adult participants completed the novel relational learning task, which explicitly trained two stimulus pairs (A- > B, A- > C) and involved a single common stimulus. Participants identify six unique relationships between stimuli: trained relations (A- > B, A- > C), mutually entailed relations (B- > A, C- > A), and combinatorial relations (B- > C, C- > B). Participants were randomly assigned to a congruent (A is opposite B, A is opposite C) or incongruent (A is opposite B, B is the same as C) training condition and completed the procedure when stimuli were observably (e.g., color-coded shapes) or arbitrarily related (e.g., letters). Results Comparisons of accuracy between training conditions using Bayesian independent samples t-tests found moderate evidence of no reliable difference between training groups when stimuli were observably related (BF01 = 3.4, δ = 0.06) and arbitrarily related (BF01 = 3.5, δ = 0.03). Comparisons of response time found strong evidence that participants took longer to identify relations when receiving incongruent training when the stimuli were visually related (BF10 = 38.8, δ = 0.9) but inconclusive evidence when the stimuli were arbitrarily related (BF10 = 1.5, δ = 0.49) (See Table 1). Conclusion These findings suggest that manipulating training conditions does not appreciably impact the ability to identify relationships between stimuli accurately. However, training appears to increase the response time needed to identify visibly related stimuli accurately. While this is a promising theoretically-derived learning paradigm, further research is required for validation in clinical practice.