Sarah Miles will be presenting our work on how adults and children differ in their tendency to learn rules (for classification) at the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society next week (July 29-August 1) in Amsterdam. You can read the paper here, and if you happen to be at the Conference, please stop by to see the poster.

Rachel Rabi will discuss the preliminary analyses of her summer NSERC project. She is examining the effects of mood on classification learning. We predicted that positive mood should enhance learning of rules and hypothesis testing. We also predicted negative mood would reduce performance for the same kinds of categories, relative to a baseline condition. We do not expect an effect of mood for non rule-described categories. So far, our predictions have held up (you can see a graph of the data here)

We will meet on April 16th at 11:45 (the usual place). Ruby N. will discuss some data she has been collecting regarding motivation factors and a perceptual triad-classification task.

We will meet on April 2nd in room 8409 at 11:45. Sarah Miles will present data from her ongoing thesis work on category learning and visuo-spatial memory

Sarah Devantier will give a preliminary version of her brown-bag talk about some of the data we have collected in a think-aloud task with physicians. As always, we will meet at 11:45 in room 8409.

For our march 5th meeting we will read and discuss the paper by Poldrack and Foerde (2008),

Poldrack, R., &  Foerde, K.  (2008). Category learning and the memory systems debate. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 32, 197-205.

This paper is available on line, but email me if you need a copy. Although this paper is clearly in favour of Multiple memory systems, I’m hoping we get some idea of what the counter arguments might be, and how the memory systems literature informs category learning in general.

February 5 :  Zeithamova et al., 2008  and Maddox et al. (2008)

February 12: Davis et al. (in press)

February 19: No meeting L.O.V.E

Lab Meetings:

For the fall term (2008) the Categorization Lab will meet from 11:45 to 12:45 on Thursdays in room 8409 in the Social Science Centre