Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Memory and categorization have different goals. The goal of memory is to keep a distinct record of each individualitem. In contrast, categorization aims to treat items as equivalent in some way despite differences. When memory for itemsis the priority, research suggests that adults are able to bind many elements of an experience to form a complex memorystructure, and that such binding may help guard against forgetting due to interference from learning in similar situations. Whencategorization is the priority, however, complex binding structures in memory may impede generalization. In this experimentadults demonstrated robust memory for items after learning one set of categories, but much worse memory for items thatwere categorized differently in a second set. Results suggest that this interference was due to failure to form complex bindingstructures in memory, as a result of selective attention during categorization.