Category variability, exemplar similarity, and perceptual classification.
Experiments were conducted in which observers learned to classify simple perceptual stimuli into low-variability and high-variability categories. Similarities between objects were measured in independent psychological-scaling tasks. The results showed that observers classified transfer stimuli into the high-variability categories with greater probability than was predicted by a baseline version of an exemplar-similarity model. Qualitative evidence for the role of category variability on perceptual classification, which could not be explained in terms of the baseline exemplar-similarity model, was obtained as well. Possible accounts of the effects of category variability are considered in the General Discussion section.
Cohen
A L
AL
Department of Psychology, Indiana University, Bloomington 47405-7007, USA. alcohen@indiana.edu
Nosofsky
R M
RM
Zaki
S R
SR
D003071:Cognition; D006801:Humans; D009042:Motivation; D014796:Visual Perception