Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

It is not entirely clear under what conditions people are able to re-represent their knowledge of a situation without top-downinfluences, such as explicit hints. Categorisation paradigms can help investigate this problem. Sewell and Lewandowsky(2011) found that people can change categorisation strategies without further learning relatively quickly in response toan explicit hint. In their paradigm, the category space is designed such that the exemplars can be categorised accuratelyusing one of two strategies. As such, the present work used and extended this paradigm in a more knowledge-rich domain,compared to the visual domain in Sewell and Lewandowsky’s study. In contrast to the previous work, we did not findevidence for the change in strategy without further learning. Further, re-representation can be measured more clearly bytaking away the critical cue for one strategy after participants learnt it, and measuring the rates of learning.