Charting the progressive stages of concept learning as a function of exposure time

In what follows, we investigate categorization performance as a function of the length of time that a human observer is given to learn a category before continuing to a classification phase. We hypothesized that variation in categorization performance relative to these exposure time windows gives evidence in support of the multistage processing of information underlying concept formation and its relationship to visual perception and memory. We tested category learning difficulty in a seven-condition experiment with exposure durations ranging from 20 s to 200 ms. The classification performance data corresponding to each time window was then assembled to chart the progression of categorization performance. The performance results suggest that concept formation begins at a low perceptual level, surprisingly at least as early as 200 ms, and culminates in the implementation of a high-order conceptual representation that is acquired at around the 5 s mark. This investigation provides new insights into the interplay between perceptual, conceptual, and memory processes across, potentially, both iconic and visual working memory.