Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A preliminary meta-analysis using the p-curve method(Simonsohn, Nelson, & Simmons, 2014) was performed on asubset of the learned categorical perception literature toexplore the robustness of the phenomenon. Only studies usingnovel visual categories and behavioral measures wereincluded. The results strongly suggest that the phenomenon isrobust but that the studies are somewhat underpowered. Weargue that this is problematic because it renders bothstatistically significant and nonsignificant results verydifficult to interpret, which impedes progress inunderstanding the learned CP phenomenon, for example, whyexpansion vs. compression is observed, or boundary vs.dimensional effects. Fortunately, there is a clear solution:conduct studies with greater statistical power.