A new paper by Categorization Lab members Rachel Rabi, Sarah Miles, and Paul Minda that was just published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology explored category learning by young children and adults. You can read the paper here.  We conducted two experiments. The participants in our experiments were were asked to learn a set of categories for which both a single-feature rule and/or overall similarity would allow for perfect performance. Other rules allowed for suboptimal performance. After the participants learned the categories, we presented them with transfer stimuli (Experiments 1 and 2) and single features (Experiment 2) to help determine how the categories were learned. In both experiments, we found that adults made significantly more optimal rule-based responses to the test stimuli than children. Children showed a variety of categorization styles, with a few relying on the optimal rules, many relying on suboptimal single-feature rules, and only a few relying on overall family resemblance. We interpreted these results within a multiple-systems framework (like CoVIS). Children may show the patterns that they do because they lack the necessary cognitive resources to fully engage in hypothesis testing, rule selection, and verbally mediated category learning.

A new paper from our research group to appear in Academic Medicine , a collaborative project with Dr. Goldszmidt (the principle author) and Dr. Bordage, really tried to gather insight into what physicians should be thinking about during a clinical encounter. Specifically, we were interested in the conceptual frameworks used to identify and study these clinical reasoning tasks. The end result is an well-vetted list. We hope this list will drive and influence new research. Read the pre-press version here.

I will be presenting a talk called ” Did Your Subjects Eat Breakfast? Individual and Uncontrolled Variables Can Affect Performance.” A copy of the slides are available here.  If would like a copy of the questionare that we used, please click here. If you use this questionnaire in your research please cite my Psychonomics talk…a full publication will be available soon.

Ruby Nadler (3rd year Ph.D.), Rachel Rabi (1st year MSc) and Dr. Minda recently published a paper on how positive affect seems to enhance cognitive flexibility and enhance the learning of rule-defined categories. You can read the paper here.

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