Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We explore how context change and item variation duringnatural category learning influence memory and generalizationto new examples. Participants studied either images of the samebird or varied birds from each of several categories. Theseimages could be presented in a constant background color ordifferent background colors. During test, birds were presentedin only one of the studied background colors. Performance attest depended on the context overlap between study and test,with better performance when there was minimal contextchange during study. Also, contrary to previous findings, wefound that learners generalized better when items wererepeated during study and remembered old items better whenitems were varied during study. When there is a moderatedegree of context change, there is no benefit of repetition orvariation for either novel or old items. These results indicatethat context change and item variation have complementaryeffects on learning.