The Role of Symbolic Representation in Category Learning

There is evidence that language plays an important role in helping humans categorize objects (Ashby & Valentin, 2017), but is this special to language, or are symbols generally helpful. The purpose of the present study is to explore whether humans can learn visual symbols to direct their attention to salient dimensions, and whether those symbols can be used to aid categorization. The participants completed 12 tasks (first 4 training tasks and then 8 critical tasks). Half of the critical tasks had symbols as clues for categorization. The results show that participants were more accurate in tasks with symbols than those without, suggesting visual symbols can be helpful