Perceptual manifestations of an analytic structure: the priority of holistic individuation

Abstract

Properties that make items perceptually distinctive may not be represented in the dimensional structure used by subjects for analysis. In a classification task, a single dimensional structure, actually used by subjects when analyzing, occurred in several perceptual forms. Two types of perceptual variation were compared: (a) feature individuation, whether a feature occurs in a unique form in different items and (b) holistic individuation, the extent to which an item's features cohere into an individuated whole. These types of individuation had separate effects on exemplar-based classification. However, holistic individuation had priority in that the presence of individuated features did not produce exemplar-based transfer if the item's holistic properties were altered. This priority of holistic individuation occurred whether the subjects had been given the classification rule or had attempted to discover it.