Abstract
The performance of a decision bound model of categorization (Ashby, J992a; Ashby & Maddox, in press) is compared with the performance of two exemplar models. The first is the generalized context model (e.g., Nosofsky, 1986, 1992) and the second is a recently proposed deterministic exemplar model (Ashby & Maddox, in press), which contains the generalized context model as a special case. When the exemplars from each category were normally distributed and the optimal decision bound was linear, the deterministic exemplar model and the decision bound model provided roughly equivalent accounts of the data. When the optimal decision bound was nonlinear, the decision bound model provided a more accurate account of the data than did either exemplar model. When applied to categorization data collected by Nosofsky (1986, 1989), in which the category exemplars are not normally distributed, the decision bound model provided excellent accounts of the data, in many cases significantly outperforming the exemplar models. The decision bound model was found to be especially successful when(1) single subject analyses were performed, (2) each subject was given relatively extensive training, and (3) the subject's performance was characterized by complex suboptimalities. These results support the hypothesis that the decision bound is of fundamental importance in predicting asymptotic categorization performance and that the decision bound models provide a viable alternative to the currently popular exemplar models of categorization.
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The contribution of each author was equal. Parts of this research were presented at the 22nd Annual Mathematical Psychology meetings at the University of California, Irvine; at the 23rd Annual Mathematical Psychology Meetings at the University of Toronto; and at the 24th Annual Mathematical Psychology Meetings at Indiana University. This research was supported in part by a UCSB Humanities/Social Sciences Research Grant to W.T.M. and by National Science Foundation Grant BNS88-19403 to F.G.A. This work has benefited from discussion with Jerome Busemeyer and Richard Herrnstein.
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Maddox, W.T., Ashby, F.G. Comparing decision bound and exemplar models of categorization. Perception & Psychophysics 53, 49–70 (1993). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03211715
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03211715