In three experiments, we demonstrated that the self can act as a cognitive reference point, producing an egocentric asym-metry effect on distance judgments such that targets are judged as closer to the viewer than the viewer is to the target.Egocentric asymmetry was observed even when there was a fixed reference object that people could use to anchor distanceestimates across trials (Experiment 2). Further, egocentric asymmetry was greater to a non-human artifact than to a humanavatar (Experiment 3). In addition, distances from a mailbox to a human avatar were estimated as shorter than distancesfrom an avatar to a mailbox, suggesting that the special status of the self may extend to other people when compared tonon-human objects even in allocentric distance judgments (Experiment 2).

Three experiments investigated the role of conceptual abstraction in category learning. We found that people in a low-level mindset over-weighted global features in classifying novel exemplars whereas those in a high-level mindset did not (Experiments 1 and 3). The effect was on the learning process, independent of perceptual response preference (Experiment 3) and occurred despite evidence of perceptual global dominance for all groups during learning (Experiments 2 and 3). We conclude that abstraction can subordinate perceptual salience to the larger goal, integrating discrete encounters into a comprehensive representation of the underlying structure.