Intervention in multiple-cue judgment: Not always for the better

• Previous studies suggest improved learning when participants actively intervene rather than passively observe the stimuli in a judgment task. In two experiments the authors investigate if this improvement generalizes to multiple cue judgment tasks where judgments may be formed from abstract knowledge of cue-criterion relations or exemplar memory. More specific hypotheses were that intervention in learning should improve performance over observation, and that improvement should be associated with a relative shift from exemplar memory to cue abstraction. In contrast to previous studies, in a multiple-cue judgment task with binary cues and continuous criterion, there was poorer learning with intervention than observation, and participants actively experimenting more produced poorer judgments. The results suggest that intervention may distract from efficient exemplar encoding and improvement may be limited to tasks efficiently addressed by cue-abstraction.

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