{"doi":"10.31234/osf.io/ku4fr","title":"Human latent-state generalization through prototype learning with discriminative attention","abstract":"Latent causes that give rise to experience are encountered in complex, high-dimensional feature spaces. How then do people approximate the external world with lower-dimensional internal representations that generalize to novel examples or contexts? Theories suggest internal representations could be determined by discriminative boundaries, or based on the distance from prototypes/exemplars. We developed theoretical models that use both discriminative and prototype/exemplar components to form internal representations via action-reward feedback. We then developed three new latent-state learning tasks to test human use of discrimination attention and prototypes/exemplars. The majority of subjects attended to discriminative features, as well as the covariance of features within a prototype. A minority of subjects relied on a single discriminative feature. Behavior of all subjects was captured by a model that forms prototype representations and deploys context-specific discriminative attention. These results provide insights into the human ability to generalize across causal latent states learned in high-dimensional environments.","journal":"PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints)","year":2021,"id":228152,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9469,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2021-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":273841,"name":"Dhruva V. Raman","orcid":"0000-0002-8992-1353","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":286172,"name":"A. David Redish","orcid":"0000-0003-3644-9072","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":225637,"name":"John D. Murray","orcid":"0000-0003-4115-8181","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":566286,"name":"Warren Woodrich Pettine","orcid":"0000-0003-0063-0902","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":75,"raw_metadata":{"citation_network_status":"fetched"},"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:54:50.414605Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}