Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The category variability effect is referred to as that the middle item between two categories is more similar to the low-variability category but tends to be classified as the high-variability category, which challenges the exemplar model. We however hypothesized that this effect can result from the use of the single-category strategy in a binary categorization task, specifically when only the low-variability category is referenced for categorization. One experiment was conducted with a recognition task inserted in the categorization task to selectively deepen the processing for the exemplars of the high-variability category, low-variability category, or both categories. The results showed that the strongest category variability effect occurred when the low-variability category was emphasized in the recognition task. The exemplar model SD-GCM provided a good account for the category variability effect, with a large weight for the low-variability category and a small weight for the high-variability category, hence verifying our hypothesis.