Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When learning about the world, we develop mental represen-tations or concepts for things we have never seen. At the sametime, we also develop representations for things that are similarto what we have experienced. Traditionally, similarity-basedand rule-based systems have been used as distinct models tocapture conceptual representation. However, it seems implau-sible that we do not flexibly deploy both systems. Whetherboth systems can be used simultaneously to represent compo-nents of a single concept is an open empirical question. Oneexample suggesting that the use of both systems is possible isthe concept of a ZEBRA , which looks like a horse but striped.Using an artificial concept learning task, we test whether peo-ple can combine similarity and rules compositionally in orderto represent concepts. Our results suggest that people are ableto compose similarity and rules when mentally representing asingle concept.