Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Little is known about how categories are learned incidentallywithout instructions to group objects, overt decisions aboutcategory identity, or feedback about these decisions. Here weinvestigate how category learning may occur based on theassociation of categories with behaviorally-relevant events andactions. Previous research developed the SystematicMultimodal Associations Reaction Time (SMART) task inwhich participants report the location of a visual target with akeypress. The location of an upcoming visual target ispredicted by the identity of a novel sound category, exemplarsof which precede appearance of the visual target. Thiscategory-to-location mapping supports incidental learning ofauditory categories, with generalization to novel exemplars.Here, we examined whether this learning is driven by thecategory-to-location relationship, or instead by the associationwith distinct response alternatives. Across two experiments, weobserve that both a covert, reaction time measure of categorylearning and an overt labeling task testing generalization oflearning converge to indicate that the category-to-responserelationship drives incidental learning in the SMART task.