Research on contrastive category learning has revealed a robust tendency for learners to develop caricaturized representations (elsewhere: ideals or extreme points) to support successful discriminative classification. These representations are defined by extreme values on some task-relevant dimension and are often indicated as highly representative of their categories. Work in this area has elaborated the task constraints and contexts necessary for these representations to emerge, but little research has scrutinized whether caricatured representations extend beyond a category’s known range of feature values. To these ends, across two experiments, we investigated whether the most representative items for a category can extend beyond the training set. Data from pairwise typicality comparisons following learning suggests that caricatured categories may be supported by representations that extend past the feature range present in training. The findings are better explained by certain representational frameworks (e.g., adaptive reference points, boundaries) than others (e.g., exemplars, clusters).

Snoddy and Kurtz (2020) demonstrated spontaneous transfer of relational categories to new learning. Recognition memory data suggested that transfer was driven by schematization during learning. In the present study, we explored whether schema abstraction underlies transfer and recognition effects. Participants were assigned to condition based on the type of initial learning: classification with comparison, supervised observation with comparison, single-item supervised observation, or baseline (no learning). After initial learning, participants underwent a study phase and recognition test on novel stimuli followed by a target category learning task involving the same underlying category structures expressed in a new domain. During the recognition test, all conditions led to increased false alarms relative to baseline. Only the comparison conditions exhibited analogical transfer on the target category learning task. Results suggest that comparison facilitates the transfer of relational categories (due to schema abstraction), but recognition memory effects may be driven by more general categorization mechanisms.