Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Language has been shown to influence the ability to formcategories. Here we investigate whether linguistic labels areprivileged compared to other types of cues (e.g., numbers orsymbols), and whether labels exert their effects regardless ofwhether they are introduced intentionally. In a categorizationtask, we found that adults were more likely to use labels to de-termine category boundaries compared to numbers or symbols,and that these effects persisted in all intentionality manipula-tions. These findings suggest that labels have a powerful effecton categorization compared to other cues; most strikingly, la-bels (but not other cues) are used during categorization evenwhen people are specifically asked to ignore them. These re-sults provide novel support for the position that labels indicatecategory membership.