Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Three experiments investigated the role of conceptual abstraction in category learning. We found that people in a low-level mindset over-weighted global features in classifying novel exemplars whereas those in a high-level mindset did not (Experiments 1 and 3). The effect was on the learning process, independent of perceptual response preference (Experiment 3) and occurred despite evidence of perceptual global dominance for all groups during learning (Experiments 2 and 3). We conclude that abstraction can subordinate perceptual salience to the larger goal, integrating discrete encounters into a comprehensive representation of the underlying structure.