Learning Features of Representation in Conceptual Context

When people categorize an object, they often encode a certain number of its properties for later classification. In Schyns and Murphy (1993), we suggested that the way people group objects into categories could induce the learning of new dimensions of ca egorization--i.e., dimensions that did not exist prior to the experience with the categorization system. In this research, we examine whether the context of known concepts can influence feature extraction. The first experiment simply tested whether the context of different object categories could change the erception of the same target stimuli. The second experiment examined whether learning category Bgiven the concept of category Amay result in different features being learned that learning Agiven B . The results showed that the context of known concepts influence the features people learn to represent