Distinguishing easily confusable categories requires learners to detect their predictive differences. Interleaved sequences -- switching between categories -- help learners to detect such differences. Nonetheless, learners prefer to block -- switching within a category -- to detect commonalities. Across two 2 × 2-factorial experiments, we…

Though individual categorization or decision processes have been studied separately in many previous investigations, few studies have investigated how they interact by using a two-stage task of first categorizing and then deciding. To address this issue, we investigated a categorization-decision task in two experiments. In both, participants were…

For nearly half a century now, Garner interference has been serving as the gold standard measure of dimensional interaction and selective attention. But the mechanisms that generate Garner interference are still not well understood. The current study proposes a novel theory that ascribes the interference (and dimensional interaction in general) to…