|
|
Article: Learning categories by making predictions: An investigation of indirect category learning
- Article from:
- Memory & Cognition
- Article date:
- December 1, 2004
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright Psychonomic Society, Inc. Dec 2004. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
|
Categories are learned in many ways, but studies of category learning have generally focused on classification learning. This focus may limit the understanding of categorization processes. Two experiments were conducted in which participants learned categories of animals by predicting how much food each animal would eat. We refer to this as indirect category learning, because the task and the feedback were not directly related to category membership, yet category learning was necessary for good performance in the task. In the first experiment, we compared the performance of participants who learned the categories indirectly with the performance of participants who first learned to classify ...