COMPARISON-BASED LEARNING - EFFECTS OF COMPARING INSTANCES DURING CATEGORY LEARNING

When learning about a category, people often compare new instances wit h similar old instances and notice features common to the compared ins tances. Five experiments demonstrate that such comparisons cause featu res common to compared instances to be considered more important for t he category than equally frequent features that are not common to comp ared instances. Experiment 1 shows that what is learned depends on whi ch instances are compared. Experiment 2 investigates the conditions un der which comparison-based learning occurs. The next experiments find that these comparisons affect subjective feature frequency (Experiment 3) and sensitivity to feature correlations (Experiment 4). Experiment 5 shows that comparisons during early learning affect what is learned from later instances. The discussion focuses on the implications for models of category representation.