Ties That Bind: Reconciling Discrepancies Between Categorization and Naming

We present the results of a study designed to show that dissociations between lexical and similaritybased boundary partitions for a set of items can be produced in the laboratory. This is achieved by an incremental process of learning to assign a category label to items increasingly far removed (in similarity space) from the center of that category and approaching a different category. This process occurs in parallel with a compression effect in psychological similarity space such that increasingly distant items labeled as members of category A nonetheless come to be viewed as more similar to category B (the category to which they are in fact closer in precategory learning similarity space) than they are by people who have not learned the category distinction.