In this study, we examined how categorical distinctiveness is related to memory. In the first stage, participants searched for a target image to remember among five distractor images belonging to another category. The categorical visual search was organized differently: in the low categorical distinctiveness (LCD) condition, the target image was surrounded by perceptually similar images, from the same superordinate category (e.g., cat / dogs); in the high categorical distinctiveness (HCD) condition, it was surrounded by dissimilar objects, from another superordinate category (e.g., cat / chairs). In the second stage, participants performed a recognition test. We expected that visual search would lead to a distortion in remembering, a shift of the memory trace to the prototype (Lupyan, 2008): more false alarms in the LCD condition than in the HCD condition. Our hypothesis was fully confirmed.

Formal explanations are not tautological per se and do have explanatory power, although circular explanations can mimic them by emulating their form. (e.g., "This atom possesses an electric charge because it is an ion."). We explored the possibility of enhancing the capacity to detect circular formal explanations by pre-activating participants' prior knowledge of definitions for relevant terms. In Experiment 1, we posed questions about definitions (e.g., What is the best definition for "ion?") immediately before asking participants to evaluate the satisfactoriness of the explanation. In Experiments 2, we directly provided definitions of the terms. Across both experiments, participants consistently rating such explanations as more satisfactory compared to explicitly circular explanations (e.g., "This atom possesses an electric charge because it is an electrically charged atom"). Furthermore, Experiment 1 demonstrated that the effect is not dependent on individuals' ability to select the correct definition of a term.