Abstract
Three experiments studied the effects of category structure on the development of categorization automaticity. In Experiment 1, participants were each trained for over 10,000 trials in a simple categorization task with one of three category structures. Results showed that after the first few sessions, there were no significant behavioral differences between participants who learned rule-based versus information-integration category structures. Experiment 2 showed that switching the locations of the response keys after automaticity had developed caused a similar highly significant interference, regardless of category structure. In Experiment 3, a simultaneous dual task that engaged executive functions did not interfere with either rule-based or information-integration categorization. These novel results are consistent with a theory assuming separate processing pathways for initial rule-based and information-integration category learning but a common processing pathway after the development of automaticity.
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This research was supported in part by the U.S. Army Research Office through the Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies under Grant W911NF-07-1-0072 and by Grant R01 MH3760-2 from the National Institutes of Health.
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Hélie, S., Waldschmidt, J.G. & Ashby, F.G. Automaticity in rule-based and information-integration categorization. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics 72, 1013–1031 (2010). https://doi.org/10.3758/APP.72.4.1013
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/APP.72.4.1013