Journal
SEEING AND PERCEIVING
Volume 25, Issue 3-4, Pages 237-261Publisher
BRILL ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS
DOI: 10.1163/187847511X571519
Keywords
Categorization; perceptual organization; simplicity; regularity; part configuration; part saliency; shape transformations
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Funding
- Fund for Scientific Research (FWO Flanders) [G.0218.06]
- University Research Council [IDO/02/004]
- Methusalem grant by the Flemish Government [METH/08/02]
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Rules and similarity are at the heart of our understanding of human categorization. However, it is difficult to distinguish their role as both determinants of categorization are confounded in many real situations. Rules are based on a number of identical properties between objects but these correspondences also make objects appearing more similar. Here, we introduced a stimulus set where rules and similarity were uncoil-founded and we let participants generalize category examples towards new instances. We also introduced a method based on the frequency distribution of the formed partitions in the stimulus sets, which allowed us to verify the role of rules and similarity in categorization. Our evaluation favoured the rule-based account. The most preferred rules were the simplest ones and they consisted of recurrent visual properties (regularities) in the stimulus set. Additionally, we created different variants of the same stimulus set and tested the moderating influence of small changes in appearance of the stimulus material. A conceptual manipulation (Experiment I) had no influence but all visual manipulations (Experiment 2 and 3) had strong influences in participants' reliance on particular rules, indicating that prior beliefs of category defining rules are rather flexible. (C) Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011
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