Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Categorization is a fundamental cognitive skill that spans the senses. Even so, most research has focused on categorization and category learning in the visual modality. As a result, it is not yet clear how modality influences the perceptual and cognitive processes supporting category learning. In two experiments, we tested whether category learning results in amodal or modality-specific representations. We found strong evidence for modality-specific representations with independent learning across modalities. These results highlight the need to look beyond vision when constructing and testing models categorization and category learning. These findings also contribute to the longstanding debate on the amodal/modal nature of human knowledge, which is of broad interest to the cognitive science community.