Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Key questions in the study of categorization are how individuals form categories from experience and extend that knowledge to assess membership of novel examples. Popular accounts predict generalization to be based on either similarity to reference points or the application of rules or bounds. However, recent data show that some categorization behavior defies the predictions of leading accounts. Expanding on these findings, in the present study participants learned a one or two dimensional alternating category structure and were then tested on near and far transfer tasks. Findings reveal that individuals can extend a learned alternating category structure across multidimensional spaces and increasingly distant generalization regions. Additionally, subjects readily invoke alternation during the far transfer task (a task which does not involve classification), providing critical evidence that learning of the alternating category structure was driven by relational rather than feature-based similarity.