Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When participants view and then reproduce simple objects thatvary along a continuous dimension such as length or shade, orwhen they view images of faces that vary in emotional expression,their estimates tend to be biased toward the average value of thepresented objects, a phenomenon that has been modeled as theresult of a Bayesian combination of prior category knowledge withan imprecise memory trace (Corbin, Crawford & Vavra, 2017;Huttenlocher, Hedges & Vevea, 2000). Whereas previous workdescribed a general cognitive strategy based on data aggregatedacross participants, here we examined individual differences instrategy. Thirty-six participants viewed and reproduced 496morphed face stimuli that ranged from angry to happy. We foundsubstantial variation in the bias patterns participants produced.Individuals’ estimates were well fit by a model that positedattraction toward three categories, one at the happy end of therange, one at the angry end, and one that captured the entire rangeof presented stimuli, and by allowing the weight given to eachcategory to vary by participant.