Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Categorization is a fundamental cognitive strategy employed to ease information processing and to aid memory formation. Past research on how humans categorize objects has used images of objects as experimental stimuli. Concurrently, studies in the past 10 years have found differences in the processing of images as compared to real-world objects. One proposed explanation is that these results are due to differences in the affordances of images versus objects. Using a similarity judgement paradigm, we explored the effect of affordances in a categorization task including words (object names), images, and objects. Consistent with previous research, we found significant differences in how participants made similarity judgements of images and objects. Moreover, we found that similarity judgments using object names were much more similar to the judgments of pictures than of objects. An exploratory cluster analysis opens the possibility of framing such differences as affordance driven. These results suggest a need for more ecologically valid categorization tasks, more conservative inferences when using images as stimuli in these tasks, and the need for further exploring the role of affordances in categorization.