Abstract
In this study, we examined the effect of within-category diversity on people’s ability to learn perceptual categories, their inclination to generalize categories to novel items, and their ability to distinguish new items from old. After learning to distinguish a control category from an experimental category that was either clustered or diverse, participants performed a test of category generalization or old-new recognition. Diversity made learning more difficult, increased generalization to novel items outside the range of training items, and made it difficult to distinguish such novel items from familiar ones. Regression analyses using the generalized context model suggested that the results could be explained in terms of similarities between old and new items combined with a rescaling of the similarity space that varied according to the diversity of the training items. Participants who learned the diverse category were less sensitive to psychological distance than were the participants who learned a more clustered category.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
References
Ashby, F. G., &Maddox, W. T. (1990). Integrating information from separable psychological dimensions.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,16, 598–612.
Barsalou, L. W. (1983). Ad-hoc categories.Memory & Cognition,11, 211–227.
Braida, L. D., &Durlach, N. I. (1972). Intensity perception: II. Resolution in one-interval paradigms.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,51, 483–502.
Cohen, A. L., Nosofsky, R. M., &Zaki, S. R. (2001). Category variability, exemplar similarity, and perceptual classification.Memory & Cognition,29, 1165–1175.
Corter, J. E., &Gluck, M. A. (1992). Explaining basic categories: Feature predictability and information.Psychological Bulletin,111, 291–303.
Flannagan, M. J., Fried, L. S., &Holyoak, K. J. (1986). Distributional expectations and the induction of category structure.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition,12, 241–256.
Fried, L. S., &Holyoak, K. J. (1984). Induction of category distributions: A framework for classification learning.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition,10, 234–257.
Hahn, U., &Ramscar, M. C. A. (2001) Mere similarity? In, U. Hahn, and M. C. A. Ramscar (Eds.),Similarity and categorization (pp. 257–272). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Heit, E., &Hahn, U. (2001). Diversity-based reasoning in children.Cognitive Psychology,43, 243–273.
Homa, D., &Vosburgh, R. (1976). Category breadth and the abstraction of prototypical information.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning & Memory,2, 322–330.
Jones, G. V. (1983). Identifying basic categories.Psychological Bulletin,94, 423–428.
Luce, R. D. (1959).Individual choice behavior: A theoretical analysis. New York: Wiley.
Mareschal, D., French, R. M., &Quinn, P. C. (2000). A connectionist account of asymmetric category learning in early infancy.Developmental Psychology,36, 635–645.
McLaren, I. P. L. (1997). Categorization and perceptual learning: An analogue of the face inversion effect.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,50A, 257–273.
Medin, D. L., &Schaffer, M. M. (1978). Context theory of classification learning.Psychological Review,85, 207–238.
Murphy, G. L., &Medin, D. L. (1985). The role of theories in conceptual coherence.Psychological Review,92, 289–316.
Neumann, P. G. (1977). Visual prototype formation with discontinuous representation of dimensions of variability.Memory & Cognition,5, 187–197.
Nosofsky, R. M. (1984). Choice, similarity, and the context theory of classification.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition,10, 104–114.
Nosofsky, R. M. (1986). Attention, similarity and the identification-categorization relationship.Journal of Experimental Psychology: General,115, 39–57.
Nosofsky, R. M. (1988). Similarity, frequency, and category representations.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition,14, 54–65.
Nosofsky, R. M., &Johansen, M. K. (2000). Exemplar-based accounts of “multiple-system” phenomena in perceptual categorization.Psychonomic Bulletin & Review,7, 375–402.
Osherson, D. N., Smith, E. E., Wilkie, O., Lopez, A., &Shafir, E. (1990). Category-based induction.Psychological Review,97, 185–200.
Palmeri, T. J., &Nosofsky, R. M. (2001). Central tendencies, extreme points, and prototype enhancement effects in ill-defined perceptual categorization.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,54A, 197–235.
Peterson, M. J., Meagher, R. B., Jr.,Chait, H., &Gillie, S. (1973). The abstraction and generalization of dot patterns.Cognitive Psychology,4, 378–398.
Posner, M. I., Goldsmith, R., &Welton, K. E., Jr. (1967). Perceived distance and the classification of distorted patterns.Journal of Experimental Psychology,73, 28–38.
Posner, M. I., &Keele, S. W. (1968). On the genesis of abstract ideas.Journal of Experimental Psychology,77, 353–363.
Quinn, P. C., Eimas, P. D., &Rosenkrantz, S. L. (1993). Evidence for representations of perceptually similar natural categories by 3-month-old and 4-month-old infants.Perception,22, 463–475.
Rips, L. J. (1989). Similarity, typicality, and categorization. In S. Vosniadou & A. Ortney (Eds.),Similarity and analogical reasoning (pp. 21–59). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Rosch, E., Mervis, C. B., Gray, W. D., Johnson, D. M., &Boyes-Braem, P. (1976). Basic objects in natural categories.Cognitive Psychology,8, 382–439.
Shin, H. J., &Nosofsky, R. M. (1992). Similarity-scaling studies of dotpattern classification and recognition.Journal of Experimental Psychology: General,121, 278–304.
Smith, E. E., &Sloman, S. A. (1994). Similarity- versus rule-based categorization.Memory & Cognition,22, 377–386.
Smith, J. D., &Minda, J. P. (2002). Distinguishing prototype-based and exemplar-based processes in dot-pattern category learning.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition,28, 800–811.
Stewart, N., &Chater, N. (2002). The effect of category variability in perceptual categorization.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition,28, 893–907.
Tabachnick, B. G., &Fidell, L. S. (1996).Using multivariate statistics (3rd ed.). New York: HarperCollins.
Wayne, A. (1995). Bayesianism and diverse evidence.Philosophy of Science,62, 111–121.
Younger, B. A. (1985). The segregation of items into categories by tenmonth-old infants.Child Development,56, 1574–1583.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
L.B.C.E. was supported by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and the Unilever Corporation.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Hahn, U., Bailey, T.M. & Elvin, L.B.C. Effects of category diversity on learning, memory, and generalization. Mem Cogn 33, 289–302 (2005). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03195318
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03195318