Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A novel experimental method is motivated and applied in aneffort to test for effects of category learning on perceptualdiscrimination so as to clearly distinguish category boundaryeffects of expansion and compression from changes insensitivity to stimulus dimensions. The method includes acontrol group performing a task that, like category learning,requires attention to one systematically varying stimulusdimension rather than another. Discrimination accuracy istracked over time and measured using a psychophysicalstaircase procedure tailored to individual participants thatdoesn’t rely on memory. Initial results suggest improvementin discrimination accuracy over time, particularly on thedimension relevant to the categorization or control task, butno evidence of category boundary effects or effects ofcategory learning on dimension perception stronger than thoseof the control task. Possible reasons for this and directions forfurther research are briefly discussed .