Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Unsupervised Category Learning With Integral-Dimension Stimuli, Shawn W. Ell, Gregory F. Ashby, Steven B. Hutchinson

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

Despite the recent surge in research on unsupervised category learning, the majority of studies have focused on unconstrained tasks in which no instructions are provided about the underlying category structure. Relatively little research has focused on constrained tasks in which the goal is to learn pre-defined stimulus clusters in the absence of feedback. The few studies that have addressed this issue have focused almost exclusively on stimuli for which it is relatively easy to attend selectively to the component dimensions (i.e., separable dimensions). In the present study, we investigated the ability of participants to learn categories constructed from stimuli for …