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How words anchor categorization: conceptual flexibility with labeled and unlabeled categories*‡

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2014

JACKSON TOLINS  and
ELIANA COLUNGA
JACKSON TOLINS*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz
ELIANA COLUNGA
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Colorado, Boulder
*
†Address for correspondence: Jackson Tolins, University of California, Psychology Department, 1156 High St., Santa Cruz, CA 95060. e-mail: jtolins@ucsc.edu
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Abstract

Labeled categories are learned faster, and are subsequently more robust than categories learned without labels. The label feedback hypothesis (Lupyan, 2012) accounts for these effects by introducing a word-driven top-down modulation of perceptual processes involved in categorization. By testing categorization flexibility with and without labels, we demonstrate the ways in which labels do and do not modulate category representations. In Experiment 1, transfer involved a change in selective attention, and results indicated that labels did not impact relearning. In Experiment 2, when transfer involved a change in the behavioral response to categories whose structures did not change, a reversal shift, learning the categories with labels speeded recovery. We take this finding as evidence that the augmentation of perceptual processes by words is on the one hand fairly weak without explicit reinforcement, but on the other allows for category representations to be more abstract, allowing greater flexibility in behavior.

Keywords

categorizationlanguage and cognitionflexible cognitionselective attention
Type
Research Article
Information
Language and Cognition , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , June 2015 , pp. 219 - 238
Copyright
Copyright © UK Cognitive Linguistics Association 2014 

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Footnotes

*

Portions of this study were presented at the 35th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, in Berlin, Germany. The authors thank the conference reviewers and attendees for their useful feedback. The authors also thank the many research assistants at the CU Language Project who assisted in this project.

‡

The original version of this article was published with last word of the title missing. A notice detailing this has been published and the error rectified in the online and print PDF and HTML copies.

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