Learning to categorize perceptually similar stimuli can result in people becoming more sensitive to differences along perceptual dimensions that are relevant to category membership and/or less sensitive to equivalent differences along irrelevant perceptual dimensions. These effects of acquired distinctiveness and acquired equivalence may be caused…

Assessed students' ability to discriminate between two generalized personality interpretations, which varied in their base rate accuracy within a student sample in two experiments. Students recognized that the two generalized personality interpretations differed in their base rate accuracy and that neither interpretation described the students as…

Three experiments tested the application to art of an hypothesis from the concept attainment literature, that conceptual learning is enhanced by providing multiple examples prior to test trials. Subjects were given discrimination tasks involving surrealistic and non-surrealistic paintings. The feature abstraction model proved inadequate in this…