Blind to object changes: When learning the same object at different levelsof categorization modifies its perception

The perceptual features people extract from objects depend on how they typi cally categorize them. It is now commonly acknowledged that the human perce iver can interact with the objects of his or her world at different hierarc hically organized levels of categorization. People who have learned to cate gorize an object as general or specific may therefore perceive different fe atures in this object. We report two experiments that examined the hypothes is that the nature of categorization (general vs. specific) can influence t he perceived properties of an identical distal object.