Flexible tuning of similarity in exemplar-based categorization.

Flexibility in exemplar-based categorization was investigate in 3 experiments. Ss categorized schematic drawings of individuals'faces while they received information about the kinship relation between these individuals and previously observed exemplars. In Experiments 1 and 2, initial training was incidental, whereas an intentional learning task was used in Experiment 1. In all experiments, the kinship manipulation systematically affected categorizations. Model-based analyses showed that the effect of the kinship manipulation could be described by similarity-based exemplar models if it was assumed that Ss applied different levels of generalization as a function of the kinship instructions