Categorical Perception Effects Induced by Category Learning

We report a series of studies designed to determine whether effects similar to those observed in the innate categorical perception (CP) of color and phonemes are induced during category learning. In Experiment 1 no evidence is found for such effects when stimuli vary unidimensionally. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrate a within-category compression effect but no between-category separation effect for stimuli varying in two dimensions. Compression only is also shown in Experiment 4, which uses pictures of actual objects. MDS analyses of these data illustrate how within-category compression effects without separation effects are sufficient for categorization, and also show that learning changes the dimensional structure of similarity space. Results are compared with those from other studies exploring similar phenomena, and with neural network simulations, and the paper closes with suggestsions for the direction of future research on these phenomena.

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