Multilevel Induction of Categories: Venomous Snakes Hijack the Learning of Lower Category Levels

Abstract

The induction of categories and concepts from examples—which plays an important role in how people come to organize and understand the world—can happen at multiple levels, but how do competing values at these different levels affect learning? Using perceptually rich images of snakes, we asked participants to attend to either the snakes’ specific genus or a broader categorization and then tested induction at both levels. We also varied the intrinsic value of the broader categorization (high value: whether the snake was venomous; low value: whether it was tropical). We found an interaction between study instruction and intrinsic value: Participants in the low-value condition were better able to induce the level they were instructed to attend to (i.e., genus or broader category) than to induce the level they were not instructed to attend to, whereas participants in the high-value condition, regardless of the level of categorization they were instructed to attend to, were significantly better at learning the broad categorization (for them, whether the snake was venomous) than were participants in the low-value condition. Our results suggest that intrinsically valuable features can disrupt the intentional learning of other, task-relevant information, but enhance the incidental learning of the same information.