The Idiosyncratic Nature of How Individuals Perceive, Represent, and Remember Their Surroundings and Its Impact on Learning-Based Generalization

The current study adopted a multimodal assessment approach to map the idiosyncratic nature of how individuals perceive, represent, and remember their surroundings and to investigate its impact on learning-based generalization. During an online differential conditioning paradigm, participants (n = 105) learned the pairing between a blue color patch (CS+) and an outcome (i.e., shock symbol) and the unpairing between a green color patch and the same outcome. After the learning task, the generalization of outcome expectancies was assessed to 14 stimuli spanning the entire blue-green color spectrum. Hereafter, a stimulus identification task assessed the ability to correctly identify the CS+ among this stimulus range. Continuous and binary color category membership judgments of the stimuli were assessed preconditioning. We found that a response model with color perception and identification performance as sole predictors was preferred to contemporary approaches that use stimulus as a predictor. Interestingly, incorporating interindividual differences in color perception, CS identification, and color categories significantly improved the models’ ability to account for different generalization patterns. Our findings suggest that insight into the idiosyncratic nature of how individuals perceive, represent, and remember their surroundings provides exciting opportunities to understand post-learning behaviors better.