Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

What affects whether one person represents an item in a similarway to another person? We examined the role of verbal labelsin promoting representational alignment. Three groups ofparticipants sorted novel shapes on perceived similarity. Priorto sorting, participants in two of the groups were pre-exposedto the shapes using a simple visual matching task and in one ofthese groups, shapes were accompanied by one of two novelcategory labels. Exposure with labels led people to representthe shapes in a more categorical way and to increasedalignment between sorters, despite the two categories beingvisually distinct and participants in both pre-exposureconditions receiving identical visual experience of the shapes.Results hint that labels play a role in aligning people's mentalrepresentations, even in the absence of communication.