Test of a potential link between analytic and nonanalytic category learning and automatic, effortful processing

The link between automatic and effortful processing and nonanalytic and ana lytic category learning was evaluated in a sample of 29 college undergradua tes using declarative memory, semantic category search, and pseudoword cate gorization tasks, Automatic and effortful processing measures were hypothes ized to be associated with nonanalytic and analytic categorization. respect ively. Results suggested that contrary to prediction strong criterion-attri bute (analytic) responding on the pseudoword categorization task was associ ated with strong automatic, implicit memory encoding of frequency-of-occurr ence information. Data are discussed in terms of the possibility that crite rion-attribute category knowledge, once established, may be expressed with few attentional resources. The data indicate that attention resource requir ements, even for the same stimuli and task. vary depending on the category rule system utilized. Also, the automaticity emerging from familiarity with analytic category exemplars is very different from the automaticity arisin g from extensive practice on a semantic category search task. The data do n ot support any simple mapping of analytic and nonanalytic forms of category learning onto the automatic and effortful processing dichotomy and challen ge simple models of brain asymmetries for such procedures. (C) 2001 Academi c Press.