Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Objects in the world are represented at multiple hierarchical levels of abstraction. For example, you can identify a four-legged creature as an animal, or a dog, or specifically as a Cocker Spaniel. While there has been extensive work examining the relationships between hierarchical category levels, it is unclear how such representations interact during categorization. That is, do individuals process category levels serially or are category levels processed in parallel during categorization? Here, we had participants learn categorization rules for four categories of novel creatures. We examined patterns of errors that participants made in a forced response task, where we manipulated the amount of time participants had to make responses on a trial-by-trial basis. Our results indicate that participants process category levels in parallel, rather than serially resolving superordinate levels before subordinate levels. Parallel processing of category levels could underpin the remarkable flexibility with which we access and deploy category information.