Modeling individual differences in learning hierarchically organised categories

Abstract

It is commonly believed that exemplar models have difficulty accounting for more accurate classification of items at the lower level of a nested hierarchy than classification of these items at a more general level. We identified groups of similarly performing participants in an experiment where such a hierarchically organised category structure had to be mastered and fitted a differently parameterised version of the ALCOVE exemplar model to each of these groups. The exemplar model had no difficulty predicting better performance at the lower level of the hierarchy than at a more general level for those groups of participants that actually displayed the supposedly challenging behavioural pattern.