The impact of categorization task demands on the development of verbal and perceptual knowledge

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When learning to associate a set of instances to a given category (for example, learning that German Shepherds, Golden Retrievers, and Chihuahuas are dogs), people acquire knowledge that can then be transferred to novel instances and situations. Simultaneously, people also develop mental representations of the things that they categorize. The goal of this program of research will be to extend our understanding of the development of verbal and perceptual knowledge as it unfolds during the categorization process.The main laboratory categorization task that I will use involves giving participants a simple verbal rule to categorize artificial stimuli. For example, participants might be told to put "blue and rectangular" objects in one category and "red and curvilinear" objects in another. The questions to be answered will include: What is the impact of prolonged learning on people's ability to learn the different features (color, shape, etc) that make up stimuli during the categorization process? How salient must features not specified by the verbal rule be in order to be learned? How predictive of category membership must features not specified by the verbal rule be in order to be learned? To what extent do explicit verbal knowledge and implicit perceptual knowledge drive category decisions? What is the impact of using imperfect verbal rules on learning?Ultimately, the interest of answering these questions is that they will help establish a link between categorization paradigms and other productive paradigms in cognitive psychology, as well as embed the categorization literature in a larger theoretical framework on learning and memory.