A study of individual differences in categorization with redundancy

Abstract

Humans and other animals are constantly learning new categories and making categorization decisions in their everyday life. However, different individuals may focus on different information when learning categories, which can impact the category representation and the information that is used when making categorization decisions. This article used computational modeling of behavioral data to take a closer look at this possibility in the context of a categorization task with redundancy. Iterative decision bound modeling and drift diffusion models were used to detect individual differences in human categorization performance. The results show that participants differ in terms of what stimulus features they learned and how they use the learned features. For example, while some participants only learn one stimulus dimension (which is sufficient for perfect accuracy), others learn both stimulus dimensions (which is not required for perfect accuracy). Among participants that learned both dimensions, some used both dimensions, while others show error and RT patterns suggesting the use of only one of the dimensions. The diversity of obtained results is problematic for existing categorization models and suggests that each categorization model may be able to account for the performance of some but not all participants.