Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Some argue that category learning is mediated by two com-peting learning systems: one explicit, one implicit (Ashby etal., 1998). These systems are hypothesised to be responsi-ble for learning rule-based and information-integration cate-gory structures respectively. However, little experimental workhas directly investigated whether people are conscious of cat-egory knowledge supposedly learned by the implicit system.Here we report one experiment that directly compared explicitrecognition memory for exemplars between these two categorystructures. Contrary to the predictions of the dual-systems ap-proach, we found preliminary evidence of superior exemplarmemory after information-integration category learning com-pared to rule-based learning. This result is consistent with thehypothesis that participants learn information-integration cate-gory structures by using complex rules.