Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study intended to investigate the effects of varying factorson the use of verbal and implicit classification systems whenlearning novel categories in an interactive video gameenvironment by measuring the effects of feature type (easy vsdifficult to describe verbally). Verbal and implicitclassification were operationalized by measuring rule-basedand family resemblance strategy use respectively. Thisexperiment found that participants presented with stimuli thatwere easy to describe verbally were more likely to use rule-based classification, while participants presented with stimulithat were difficult to describe verbally showed no preferencefor one form of classification. The results of this study open upa novel field of research within category learning, furtherexploring the effects of feature verbalizablity.