Perceptual learning for a familiar category under inversion: An analogue of face inversion?

Abstract

Expanding the Space of Cognitive Science, Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Boston, Massachusetts, July 20-23, 2011© 2011 Cognitive Science Society.This study investigated the link between expertise for a prototype-defined category and the face inversion effect. Participants in this study were first presented with a categorisation task in which they were asked to sort a number of chequerboards (in an upright orientation) into two categories. Then, in the next (study) phase, participants were presented with a set of chequerboards which included exemplars (some upright, some inverted) from one of the two categories that participants were familiar with, plus exemplars (also upright or inverted) from a novel category. Following this, participants were tested for old/new recognition for these exemplars We succeeded in obtaining the same pattern of effects reported in McLaren (1997), i.e. a significant inversion effect for stimuli drawn from the familiar category, but with standard recognition procedures. We interpret the results in terms of McLaren and Mackintosh's (2000) theory of representation development.University of Exete