Categorical perception (CP) effects manifest as faster or more accurate discrimination between objects that come from different categories compared with objects that come from the same category, controlling for the physical differences between the objects. The most popular explanations of CP effects have relied on perceptual warping causing…

The development of visual expertise is accompanied by enhanced visual object recognition memory within an expert domain. We aimed to understand the relationship between expertise and memory by modeling cognitive mechanisms. Participants with a measured range of birding expertise were recruited and tested on memory for birds (expert domain) and…

Transition effects in task-cuing experiments can be partitioned into task switching and cue repetition effects by using multiple cues per task. In the present study, the author shows that cue repetition effects can be partitioned into perceptual and conceptual priming effects. In 2 experiments, letters or numbers in their uppercase/lowercase or…

We conducted a series of recognition experiments that assessed whether visual short-term memory (VSTM) is sensitive to shared category membership of to-be-remembered (tbr) images of common objects. In Experiment 1 some of the tbr items shared the same basic level category (e.g., hand axe): Such items were no better retained than others. In the…

The composite face paradigm (Young, Hellawell, & Hay, 1987) is widely used to demonstrate holistic perception of faces (Rossion, 2013). In the paradigm, parts from different faces (usually the top and bottom halves) are recombined. The principal criterion for holistic perception is that responses involving the component parts of composites in…

The 8-coin insight problem requires the problem solver to move 2 coins so that each coin touches exactly 3 others. Ormerod, MacGregor, and Chronicle (2002) explained differences in task performance across different versions of the 8-coin problem using the availability of particular moves in a 2-dimensional search space. We explored 2 further…

Training that uses exaggerated versions of a stimulus discrimination (fading) has sometimes been found to enhance category learning, mostly in studies involving animals and impaired populations. However, little is known about whether and when fading facilitates learning for typical individuals. This issue was explored in 7 experiments. In…

How does learning to categorize objects affect how people visually perceive them? Behavioral, neurophysiological, and neuroimaging studies have tested the degree to which category learning influences object representations, with conflicting results. Some studies have found that objects become more visually discriminable along dimensions relevant…

Cantonese shape classifiers encode perceptual information that is characteristic of their associated nouns, although certain nouns are exceptional. For example, the classifier "tiu" occurs primarily with nouns for long-narrow-flexible objects (e.g., scarves, snakes, and ropes) and also occurs with the noun for a (short, rigid) key. In 3…

Failure to selectively attend to a facial feature, in the part-to-whole paradigm, has been taken as evidence of holistic perception in a large body of face perception literature. In this article, we demonstrate that although failure of selective attention is a necessary property of holistic perception, its presence alone is not sufficient to…

Humans have an extremely flexible ability to categorize regularities in their environment, in part because of attentional systems that allow them to focus on important perceptual information. In formal theories of categorization, attention is typically modeled with weights that selectively bias the processing of stimulus features. These theories…

The Artificial Grammar Learning task has been used extensively to assess individuals' implicit learning capabilities. Previous work suggests that participants implicitly acquire rule-based knowledge as well as exemplar-specific knowledge in this task. This study investigated whether exemplar-specific knowledge acquired in this task is based on the…

Screeners at airport security checkpoints perform an important categorization task in which they search for threat items in complex x-ray images. But little is known about how the processes of categorization stand up to visual complexity. The authors filled this research gap with screening tasks in which participants searched for members of target…

People categorized pairs of perceptual stimuli that varied in both category membership and pairwise similarity. Experiments 1 and 2 showed categorization of 1 color of a pair to be reliably contrasted from that of the other. This similarity-based contrast effect occurred only when the context stimulus was relevant for the categorization of the…