Several samples of university students in three countries completed questionnaires measuring the centrality of cognitive attributes—that is, the relative importance that various attributes bear in a person's conceptualization of objects in a given cognitive domain. In four of the samples, four different measures of attribute centrality yielded convergent results and were similarly correlated with two questionnaire measures of the degree to which the attributes were sought in new objects and provided useful information about such new objects. In an additional three samples, cognitive attributes were analyzed as both dimensional and single-category constructs, in an attempt to see which treatment yielded the more sensible interpretation of subjects' descriptions. The evidence generally favored a dimensional interpretation; that is, antonymic adjectives tended to be applied to a single object in mutually exclusive fashion, while the pair of antonyms together tended to provide a more reliable measure of attribute centrality than did each adjective considered singly.