Categorization is dividing the world into groups of things. Our ability to do this is central to our mental life, but how do we come to form the categories that we have? Psychologists have traditionally studied this question by showing people examples of novel categories and telling them, repeatedly and for every single item, which category the object belongs to. However, it appears unlikely that we receive such extensive, specific and reliable feedback in the real world. The proposed research uses a different technique - unsupervised categorization - where people are asked to classify the novel items in the way that seems most appropriate to them, without any feedback from the experimenter. This methodology seems more likely to tell us about the way in which people prefer to create categories. Through a number of controlled experiments, we will investigate the hypothesis that unsupervised categorization can occur as the result of both analytical ('problem-solving') and non-analytical ('intuitive') thought processes.

Computers