Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Participants show faster and more accurate processing for arbitrary geometrical stimuli if they are paired with a self- rel-evant label (triangle = you). We ask whether participants only form self associations with specific exemplars (triangle,circle, square), or whether they analyse the stimuli in terms of visual features, (for e.g. no. of vertices = 3), and cangeneralise the learned associations with the entire category of the stimuli (say, all triangles). In our experiments, partici-pants showed the self referential advantage not only to previously exposed exemplars of the same category, but also novelstimuli that could be categorised on the basis of similar visual features. Interestingly, they could generalise not only on thebasis of a single rule, but also on the basis of a conjunction of more than one rule. These findings could be extended toexplain social categorisation in the real world through group memberships.