Abstract

When engaging in categorical search after receiving a word cue, searchers rely on mental representations to help guide their attention. Due to this, categories that are homogeneous in appearance (e.g. banana) are located more efficiently than heterogeneous ones (e.g. shoe), as more inclusive representations are created for less variable categories. Given that search has been utilized to quantify category variability (Nako et al., 2015), we investigated if category verification can be used as an alternative method by relating response times to those of a visual search task (Hout et al., 2017). In standard category verification tasks, participants are presented with a picture of an item and indicate if it belongs to a specific category (Shoben & Smith, 1973). In Experiment 1, 20 participants viewed a picture of an item and searched for it among 19 categorical-matched non-targets (e.g. a specific clock among other clocks). In Experiment 2, 60 participants completed a category verification task with the 20 categories used in Experiment 1 (Konkle et al., 2010). A Pearson correlation revealed a negative relationship between response times in Experiment 1 and 2. If it took longer to locate a homogeneous item (e.g. a mug) in Experiment 1, it was more quickly identified as belonging to a category in Experiment 2. Our results suggest that category verification is an appropriate and objective measure to quantify categorical variability.