Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Studies in visual category learning show that participants usedifferent category generalization strategies. Some studies re-port a preference for a rule-based strategy, while others reporta preference for a similarity-based strategy. We conducted cat-egory learning experiments in which we varied three variables— family resemblance of a category, saliency of the definingrule and presentation of transfer stimulus after a delay. Ourresults show that these factors influence the choice of categorygeneralization strategy. Our study offers a possible explanationfor the divergent results in the literature.