For nearly half a century now, Garner interference has been serving as the gold standard measure of dimensional interaction and selective attention. But the mechanisms that generate Garner interference are still not well understood. The current study proposes a novel theory that ascribes the interference (and dimensional interaction in general) to…

In the current research, we tested the idea that the proximity of contrasting categories in a learning sequence would determine the features to which participants attend in a categorization task. For the first experiment, we designed a 4-category structure in which pairs of categories could be perfectly distinguished using 1 feature. Two of the…

Through the use of a new serial naming task, the authors investigated implicit learning of repeating sequences of abstract semantic categories. Participants named objects (e.g., table, shirt) appearing in random order. Unbeknownst to them, the semantic categories of the objects (e.g., furniture, clothing) followed a repeating sequence.…