Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The ability to categorize visual information is essential for human cognition. Often, this categorization is achieved via internalized rules. In rule-based categorization tasks, participants categorize stimuli according to given decision rules. In this study, we created a framework aimed at measuring the respective impact of single memory operations on task performance. We present a study investigating two central mental operations - the addition of a new and the update of an existing rule - by confronting participants with Alien images they needed to assign to planets. Both conditions showed interference effects for task performance with previously learned ones. We found improved categorization task performance when old and new rules were in accordance, but no significant effect for conflicting situations. Our experimental setting promises to be well-suited to investigate the impact of memory operations on participants' behavior in a controlled environment.