Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In unsupervised categorization, studies have shown that fewer stimuli dimensions are used for categorization with serialpresentation compared to concurrent presentation of stimuli. In this study, we investigate how a colour-based multidimen-sional descriptor might affect the number of dimensions used in categorization. Our results show that a fewer numberof dimensions are used when stimuli are presented serially irrespective of the presence of a colour-based descriptor. Wefound main effects for both the stimuli presentation mode and the colour-based descriptor. The stimuli has the same logicalstructure across all the conditions. Our results show that the notion of a natural and intuitive grouping of items is affectedby meta-level feature descriptors, that are not part of a feature-based representation of stimuli. We discuss the implica-tions of our findings for computational models of categorization, which make predictions based solely on feature-basedrepresentation of stimuli.