CATEGORIZATION UNDER TIME PRESSURE

Categorization of complex stimuli under time pressure was investigated in 3 experiments. Participants carried out standard binary classification tasks. In the transfer stage, different response deadlines were imposed. Results showed that response deadlines affected the applied level of generalization and the dimensional weight distribution. At short deadlines, participants generalized more than at longer deadlines. Dimensional weights were influenced heavily by perceptual salience at shorter deadlines, whereas they depended primarily on the formal category structure in conditions without a deadline. A formal model that extends the generalized context model of categorization with a time-dependent similarity concept is proposed to account for these results. That model provides a parsimonious and accurate account of the data from the 3 experiments.