Jp. Clapper et Gh. Bower, CATEGORY INVENTION IN UNSUPERVISED LEARNING, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition, 20(2), 1994, pp. 443-460
This research aimed to discriminate between 2 general approaches to un
supervised category learning. one based on learning explicit correlati
onal rules or associations within a stimulus domain (autocorrelation)
and the other based on inventing separate categories to capture the co
rrelational structure of the domain (category invention). An ''attribu
te-listing'' paradigm was used to index unsupervised learning in 3 exp
eriments. Each experiment manipulated the order in which instances fro
m 2 different categories were presented and evaluated the effects of t
his manipulation in terms of the 2 competing theoretical approaches to
unsupervised learning. Strong evidence was found for the use by Ss of
a discrete category invention process to learn the categories in thes
e experiments. These results also suggest that attribute listing may b
e a valuable method for future investigations of unsupervised category
learning.