Milton & Wills (2004)

It was once widely believed that classification without feedback was largely based on a single stimulus dimension in an array sort (Medin et al, 1987), but on the basis of overall similarity in a sequential sort (Regehr & Brooks, 1995). We showed that, even in the latter case, single-dimension classification is quite common, and its prevalence depends on the nature of the stimuli. We also showed what was then considered to be a paradoxical result - spatially integrated stimuli were more likely to be classified on the basis of a single dimension than spatially separated stimuli. This led up to propose the Dimmensional Summation hypothesis, starting a sequence of work beginning with Milton et al. (2008) and continuing for more than a decade (e.g. Wills et al., 2020).

Milton, F., & Wills, A.J. (2004). The influence of stimulus properties on category construction. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 30, 407-415.

Published: 1 March 2004.

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