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The impact of training methodology and category structure on the formation of new categories from existing knowledge

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Abstract

Categorization decisions are made thousands of times every day, and a typical adult knows tens of thousands of categories. It is thus relatively rare that adults learn new categories without somehow reorganizing pre-existing knowledge. Yet, most perceptual categorization research has investigated the ability to learn new categories without considering they relation to existing knowledge. In this article, we test the ability of young adults to merge already known categories into new categories as a function of training methodology and category structures using two experiments. Experiment 1 tests participants’ ability to merge rule-based or information-integration categories that are either contiguous, semi-contiguous, or non-contiguous in perceptual space using a classification paradigm. Experiment 2 is similar Experiment 1 but uses a YES/NO learning paradigm instead. The results of both experiments suggest a strong effect of the contiguity of the merged categories in perceptual space that depends on the type of category representation that is learned. The type of category representation that is learned, in turn, depends on a complex interaction of the category structures and training task. We conclude by discussing the relevance of these results for categorization outside the laboratory.

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Notes

  1. The noise distribution was cut so that the mixture parameters could not be negative and summed to 1.

  2. On any given trial, participants chose one of two response buttons so chance performance was 0.50, and each block had 96 trials.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported in part by NSF grants #1349677-BCS and #1349737 to SH and SWE (respectively).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA

    Sébastien Hélie & Farzin Shamloo

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Maine, Orono, USA

    Shawn W. Ell

Authors
  1. Sébastien Hélie
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  2. Farzin Shamloo
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  3. Shawn W. Ell
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Correspondence to Sébastien Hélie.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Hélie, S., Shamloo, F. & Ell, S.W. The impact of training methodology and category structure on the formation of new categories from existing knowledge. Psychological Research 84, 990–1005 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-018-1115-3

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