Name: Reba Koenen

Ph.D. Dissertation Proposal Meeting

Date: Wednesday, February 14th, 2024

Time: 1:30 pm

Location: JS Coon 150 or Virtual, click here to join (Meeting ID: 844 193 8294; Passcode: 732402)

Dissertation Chair/Advisor:

Sashank Varma, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)

Dissertation Committee Members:

Thackery Brown, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)

Doby Rahnev, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)

Rick Thomas, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)

Jamie C. Gorman, Ph.D. (Arizona State University)

Title: A modified SpAM task for investigating typicality and frequency effects during category processing

Abstract: This proposal investigates the frequency and typicality effects found in the categorization literature. For over 50 years, cognitive psychologists and cognitive scientists have studied how people engage in category processing. The majority of this work uses the production task (e.g., Van Overschelde et al., 2004) or the rating task (e.g., Rosch, 1975) to generate category norms. Category norms are rank orderings of the most common items (i.e., exemplars) which belong to a given category. For example, in the Fruits category, an apple is both more frequently produced and rated as more typical than a lime. Categorization research has also adopted a third, similarity based task. This sorting task – the spatial arrangement method (SpAM) – asks participants to determine how similar exemplars of a category are to one another by arranging them on a 2D plane (Goldstone, 1994). The current proposal introduces a modified version of SpAM and a new measure of placement-order to investigate a novel prediction: that frequency affects category processing earlier in time, while typicality affects category processing later in time. This hypothesis is based on the assumption that accessibility in memory results in earlier selection, while prominence in semantic memory drives later selection (Hills et al., 2012).

The current study uses these three tasks (i.e., production, rating, modified SpAM) to address six research questions which are organized by three overarching goals. The first goal considers the relationship between the frequency and typicality effects, including the way each is measured. The second investigates the usefulness of the modified SpAM task used in the current study, and its newly derived measure of placement-order and adaptation of the position measure. The third goal is to test the new hypothesis on the frequency and typicality during category processing. A comparison of the results across these tasks will also provide guidance for how each task should be used to investigate people’s category processing. The data from this study may also lead to the development of updated category norms for the Birds, Fruits, and Vegetables categories – three categories that are often used in studies of human categorization.