Category Sensitivity on a Computerized Categorization Task

Event Center A&B

This research investigates people’s ability to spontaneously recognize categories in their visual environment when they are provided with no feedback and are allowed to categorize freely. We hypothesize that people are intuitively sensitive to the overall alignability or degree of correspondence between the features of different objects, and naturally place them into different groups (categories) based on overall alignability. Participants can then compare individual objects on a feature-by-feature basis within these sets or groups. Our previous studies have provided evidence that people are sensitive to the both alignability of objects as well as individual matching features. In these studies participants were shown a 4 x 4 display containing sixteen objects and were instructed to divide these objects into categories by creating a binomial label for each one, with a letter (A, B, C…) representing a superordinate (family) level of categorization followed by a number (1, 2, 3…) representing a more subordinate (species) level of categorization. In the current study we used a computerized version of this task to restrict the amount of active comparison participants could engage in by allowing them to view only one of the sixteen objects at a time. Participants showed the same overall pattern of categorization, based on sensitive to both overall alignability and individual matching features, in both simultaneous and sequential presentation conditions. Implications and next steps are discussed.