Categorization vs. Inference: Shift in Attention or in Representation?
Sourabh Niyogi · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2005
Recently it has been found that people that learn through inference create qualitatively different cognitive representations than those who learn through categorization.The present study addresses the question of whether the findings supporting this claim generalize to a design where both learning tasks have a probabilistic relation between each stimulus cue and the category label.It was shown that participants in the categorization condition learned faster than participants in the inference condition.Further, participants in the inference condition did not rely on prototypical values when making one-cue categorizations.The results suggest that shifts in attention must be considered as a viable explanation of some of the results in studies that investigate differences between inference and categorization.