Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Word meanings are contrastive. When we are told that some- thing is a square, we are also told that it is not a triangle. How- ever, words may be learned in different contrasts. One person might learn about squares in contrast with circles. Does this mean that the two have different representations of "square?" To answer this question, participants learned to label novel shapes with novel labels in a category learning task. Critically, we manipulated the contrast participants received during learn- ing: an A-shape is specifically not a B or an A-shape is specifi- cally not a D. Afterwards, we tested participants' knowledge of the learned categories using explicit categorization tasks and similarity judgments. Contrast during learning mattered. Shapes from contrasted categories were categorized more ac- curately, were less confusable and rated as less similar.