Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Language represents a framework used to organize the things we experience. Redundant linguistic category labels facilitate category learning at a faster rate than category learning without labels (Luypan et al., 2007) suggesting language is also meaningfully involved in forming new categories. However, labels are not exclusively advantageous. Brojde et al., (2011) demonstrates that labels can be detrimental to category learning dependent on attending to historically agnostic dimensions over historically diagnostic ones (i.e., learning texture-based categories while ignoring shape). To separate historical experience from novel category learning, we task participants with classifying stimuli based on perceptual dimensions with less historical precedence as diagnostic cues for categorizing objects in everyday life (i.e., orientation and spatial frequency). Our results reveal a labeling advantage as well as slower overall learning in the orientation condition compared to spatial frequency-based learning. We discuss implications involving the historical use of these dimensions and the relationship between diagnostic and non-diagnostic dimensions.