Testing formal cognitive models of classification and old-new recognition in a real-world high-dimensional category domain

Categorization and old-new recognition memory are closely linked topics in the cognitive-psychology literature and there have been extensive past efforts at developing unified formal modeling accounts of these fundamental psychological processes. However, the existing formal-modeling literature has almost exclusively used small sets of simplified stimuli and artificial category structures. The present work extends this literature by collecting both categorization and old-new recognition judgments on a large set of high-dimensional stimuli that form real-world category structures: namely, a set of 540 images of rocks belonging to the geologically-defined categories igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary. Participants first engaged in a learning phase in which they classified large sets of training instances into these real-world categories. This was followed by a test phase in which they classified both training and novel transfer items into the learned categories and also judged whether each item was old or new. We attempted to model both the classification and recognition test data at the level of individual items. Ultimately, the categorization data were well fit by both an exemplar and clustering model, but not by a prototype model. Only the exemplar model was able to provide a reasonable first-order account of the old-new recognition data; however, the standard version of the model failed to capture the variability in hit rates within the class of old-training items themselves. An extended hybrid-similarity version of the exemplar model that made allowance for boosts in self-similarity due to matching distinctive features yielded much improved accounts of the old-new recognition data. The study is among the first to test cognitive-process models on their ability to account quantitatively for old-new recognition of real-world, high-dimensional stimuli at the level of individual items.