The Roles Of Presentation Schedules And Learning Method In Category Learning Of Medical Images

For category learning,the presentation sequence has a great influence on how to learn,what to learn,and the efficiency of learning.Previous research has found that in different environments and different materials,different sequences may be beneficial to learning.Two specific methods have commonly been used to explore the effect of item presentation on category learning: blocked and interleaved presentation.Blocking involves the grouping of items from the same category together,whereas interleaving involves the presentation of an item from one category followed by an item from another category.Which presentation sequence is optimal cannot be generalized,but depends on the interaction of intermediary learning cognitive system and category characteristics.Medical imaging category learning is a more complicated process.Abnormal chest radiographs(X-ray images)can distinguish between focal and diffuse disease,Focal diseases consist of an abnormality at a specific location,such as a tumor.The rest of the lung is relatively unaffected.In contrast to focal diseases,diffuse diseases involve the whole lung.These stimulus-level differences between diseases influence the allocation of attention in the course of visual search in a bottom-up fashion.The information that is necessary for the diagnosis is differently distributed over the image in the two types of diseases,which might lead to differences in viewing behavior,learning styles and efficiency between the two types of diseases and the normal images.In this study,we used different types of medical images as experimental materials,to explore the impact of different learning methods and different presentation sequences on the classification of medical images.Across two experiments,one group of participants studied categories in blocked presentation,observational learning or feedback learning.Another group studied the same categories in interleaved.The two experiments also differed in the learning materials,in Experiment 1,with normal images as reference,two different types of abnormal medical images were used as learning materials,while in Experiment 2,only Focal diseases and normal images were used.Finally,we compared the learning efficiency of two different learning styles.The results of experiment 1 found that the learning efficiency of different types of abnormal medical image is different.For diffuse diseases images,the subjects’ performance has been effectively improved,but focal diseases image does not increase but decreases,and no effect of presentation sequence was found.In Experiment 2,it was clearly observed that the performance of the two types of images was effectively improved during the learning phase,and the blocked presentation was more conducive to learning improvement.However,these results have not been effectively transferred to the testing phase.In the test phase,learning from normal images is improved,while the focal diseases images is hindered.As for the presentation sequence,no significant effects were found under the two learning conditions.At the same time,we also verified the advantages of feedback learning compared to observational learning.Therefore,this study can draw the following conclusions: the learning performance of different types of medical images is different,and feedback learning is slightly better than the effect of observational learning for the classification of medical images.Although the main influence of presentation sequence and its interaction with other variables have not been found,we cannot deny its advantage for category learning.Which presentation sequence can improve the efficiency of category learning better depends on the learning content and the coding processing of the learning process.