Adam Bristol, “The Relationship Between Individual Differences in Cognitive Abilities and Learning New Categories” 
Mentor: Caitlin Bowman, Psychology 
Poster #22

Category learning is the process of linking related information to form an organized knowledge structure. An important aspect of category learning is generalization, which is the ability to integrate across past experiences and apply knowledge to novel situations. In this study, we aimed to identify cognitive abilities that predict how well one can learn and generalize novel categories. We measured participants’ cognitive abilities using the WAIS-IV, which produces indices of four aspects of cognition: verbal comprehension, perceptual reasoning, working memory, and processing speed. We used a categorization task consisting of a learning phase followed by a generalization test. During the learning phase, participants learned to categorize cartoon animals into two categories through feedback. In the generalization test, participants were shown novel example category members and categorized them without feedback. We then analyzed the relationship between each of these cognitive metrics and generalization performance. This experiment will help to better understand how individual differences in certain cognitive domains affect a person’s ability to learn and generalize category labels.