Instances and Category Structure in Intercategory Relationships

An experiment was performed to examine the role of category instances and category structure in the transfer of learning between categories. Two problems in learning of categories were presented using exemplars of categories that were individuals with specified demographic characteristics. One group received two problems in which the same individuals were used as exemplars in both problems. The categories in both problems partitioned the exemplars in the same way, such that learning of the first problem could be transferred to the second problem by learning the correspondence. A second group received two problems which did not overlap on specific exemplars, but the second problem categorization rule preserved the attribute-value structure of the first problem. A third group received two problems which overlapped completely on specific exemplars, but in which there was no correspondence between problems in the way the rule partitioned the set. Performance on the second problem showed different patterns for the three groups. Results suggest that intercategory relationships are mediated in part by some exemplar-based representation and in part by structural similarity.