Abstract
Being able to categorize objects as similar or different is an essential skill. An important aspect of learning to categorize is learning to attend to relevant features (i.e., features that determine category membership) and ignore irrelevant features of the to-be-categorized objects. Feature variability across objects of different categories is informative, because it allows inferring the rules underlying category membership. In this study, participants learned to categorize fictitious creatures (i.e., aliens). We measured attention to the aliens during learning using eye-tracking and calculated the attentional focus as the ratio of attention to relevant versus irrelevant features. As expected, participants’ categorization accuracy improved with practice; however, in contrast to our expectations, their attentional focus did not improve with practice. When computing the attentional focus, attention to the aliens’ eyes was disregarded, because while eyes attract a lot of attention, they did not vary across aliens (non-informative feature). Yet, an explorative analysis of attention to eyes suggested that participants’ attentional focus did become somewhat more efficient in that over time they learned to ignore the eyes. Results are discussed in the context of the need for instructional methods to improve attentional focus in learning to categorize.
Highlights
The ability to categorize is an important skill for people
This study aimed to investigate the development of attentional focus during and after learning a categorization task
As most of our participants did not fully learn to categorize the aliens and we could not conduct the planned analyses over the test phase, we only analyzed the development of attention and accuracy during the learning phase
Summary
The ability to categorize (i.e., to put people or things into groups with the same features) is an important skill for people. One account is that categorization is based on rules and definitions. If an animal lays eggs and has feathers and a beak, it is a bird. Another is that objects are categorized based on their similarity to other members of the category or Attention Development in Categorization Learning to a prototype. We focused on the first way of categorization, and we investigated the role of attention in learning rule-based categorization. A student may look at the size of the rock to categorize it, even though rock size does not give much information about the type of rock (i.e., irrelevant feature), contrary to, for example, its color (i.e., relevant feature)
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