ATTRIBUTE CONJUNCTIONS AND THE PART CONFIGURATION ADVANTAGE IN OBJECTCATEGORY LEARNING

Five experiments demonstrated that in object category learning people are particularly sensitive to conjunctions of part shapes and relative locations. Participants learned categories defined by a part's shape and color (part-color conjunctions) or by a part's shape and its locat ion relative to another part (part-location conjunctions). The statist ical properties of the categories were identical across these conditio ns, as were the salience of color and relative location. Participants were better at classifying objects defined by part-location conjunctio ns than objects defined by part-color conjunctions. Subsequent experim ents revealed that this effect was not due to the specific color manip ulation or the role of location per se. These results suggest that the shape bias in object categorization is at least partly due to sensiti vity to part-location conjunctions and suggest a new processing constr aint on category learning.