TY - JOUR TI - Examining the relationship between learning discriminations, working memory, attentional control, and fluid intelligence DO - https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3X92DF4 PY - 2016 AB - Multiple cognitive processes have shown to be related to one another in recent studies. For example, one study found executive functions such as working memory, attentional control, and associative learning are correlated with fluid intelligence (Kaufman et al., 2009). The present study is the first study to look at specific learning patterns in associative learning with the constructs of working memory, attentional control, and fluid intelligence. The specific learning patterns studied here include negative patterning, positive patterning, and biconditional discriminations. First, the goal of this study was to see if specific associative learning patterns were related to working memory, attentional control, and fluid intelligence. It was further hypothesized that those who learn negative patterning would have higher scores on working memory, attentional control, and fluid intelligence. Furthermore, this study aimed to add support to the notion that negative patterning is harder to learn than biconditional discriminations. Our results conclude that negative patterning is harder to learn than biconditional discriminations and positive patterning. We found that negative patterning was significantly correlated with working memory and fluid intelligence. Additionally, we found that biconditional discriminations were significantly correlated with attentional control. Therefore, the results of this study suggest that specific learning patterns are related to performance in important cognitive constructs that are used every day. This has practical importance because people constantly learn to associate stimuli together. This study suggests that those who are better at learning more complex association patterns also perform better on other related cognitive tasks. KW - Psychology KW - Paired-association learning KW - Short-term memory LA - eng ER -