Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When people categorize an object, they often encode a certain number of its properties for later classification. In Schyns and Murphy (in press), we suggested that the way people group objects into categories could induce the learning of new dimensions of categorization--i.e., dimensions that did not exist prior to the experience with the categorization system. In this research, we examine whether the context of known concepts can influence feature extraction. The first experiment simply tested whether the context of different object categories could change the perception of the same target stimuli. The second experiment examined whether learning category B given the concept of category A may result in different features being learned that learning A given B. The results showed that the context of known concepts influence the features people learn to represent object categories.