Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Learning concepts and categories in the real world is often ac-companied by verbal labels. The existing theoretical accountsof how labels influence what we learn range from facilitationto overshadowing, with changes occurring over development.Studies investigating how labels influence what people learnhave typically been confined to a category learning framework,where participants were tasked to learn how to discriminatecategories or infer missing category properties. Here, we in-vestigate how the absence or presence of labels, both commonand unique, alter how people attend and what they remember ina more general setting. Our results suggest that unique labelsmay promote visual exploration of objects; whereas, there wasno evidence to support the claim that hearing the same labelassociated with different members of a to-be-learned categorydirected attention to common features.