Nothing Compares: Unraveling Learning Task Effects in Judgment and Categorization

In judgment and categorization, the task is to infer the criterion value of an object based on cues. The cognitive mechanisms underlying such inferences are often distinguished in terms of whether they rely on an abstracted cue– criterion rule or on retrieving exemplars. The use of cue-based and exemplar-based strategies (and the associated generalization ability) has been shown to be influenced by how people had previously learned about the structure of the environment: learning by comparing two objects on the criterion promotes the subsequent adoption of a cue-based strategy (and generalization ability), directly learning the continuous criterion for each individual object promotes the use of an exemplar-based strategy. It is currently unclear, however, how to explain these learning task effects theoretically. We disentangled the role of three theoretically relevant differences between the two types of learning task: (a) the opportunity to directly compare the cue profiles of the objects, (b) the provision of continuous criterion information, and (c) the relative (as opposed to absolute) nature of the feedback given. In three experiments, and consistently across a categorization task and a judgment task, we found that the learning task effects seem to be driven by the relative nature of the feedback in learning by comparison, and, to a lesser extent, by the provision of the object’s continuous criterion values in direct criterion learning. Cue comparison during training did not seem to contribute to the learning task effects. Our results extend existing theoretical frameworks for the use of cue-based and exemplar-based strategies.