J. Saiki, THE ROLE OF STRUCTURAL CONSISTENCY BETWEEN CATEGORIES AND ATTRIBUTES IN HIERARCHICAL CATEGORY LEARNING, Japanese psychological research, 40(3), 1998, pp. 144-155
This study investigated how consistency between categories and attribu
tes determines attribute selection in hierarchical category learning.
Participants learned six categories for which number and color were eq
ually relevant attributes, followed by a transfer task, to test which
attribute was used. Before that, half of them learned embedding higher
-level categories for which numbers were likely to be used. Orthogonal
to this factor, the hierarchical structure was made explicit for half
of them by category labels. The results showed that participants used
numbers in the prior learning, but that the use of numbers was inhibi
ted in the subsequent six-category learning task. However, this inhibi
tory effect was reduced when the hierarchical structure was explicit.
The pattern of results suggests that attribute selection is determined
by structural consistency between categories and attributes, not by a
prior use of an attribute.