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| Using Labels To Organize Knowledge Into Correct Categories |
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| SciMed - Neuroscience | |||
| TS-Si News Service | |||
| Wednesday, 05 December 2007 20:00 | |||
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keeping track of people and things
Pittsburgh, PA, USA. A popular urban legend suggests that Eskimos have dozens of words for snow. As a culture that faces frigid temperatures year-round, it is important to differentiate between things like snow on the ground (“aput”) and falling snow (“qana”). Psychologists have noted this phenomenon and begun an examination to determine if learning different names for things helps to tell them apart.
Researchers asked whether all other things being equal, learning names for unfamiliar items or people really makes it easier to learn to categorize them. In a study that appears in Psychological Science, Gary Lupyan and David Rakison from Carnegie Mellon University and their colleague James McClelland of Stanford University, discuss their findings.
 In a series of experiments, college undergraduates played a game where they were asked to imagine that they were explorers on planet “Teeb” while subtly distinct “aliens” would appear individually on a computer screen in front of them. Their goal was to categorize these aliens into two types: those to be avoided and those to be approached. Participants pressed different keys to indicate which aliens they believed they should approach and which should be avoided. After each response, they would hear a buzz or a beep to let them know if their response was correct.
One group of participants was told that previous visitors to the planet have found it useful to refer to the two types of aliens as “grecious” and “leebish.” After each response, participants in this group saw or heard the label that corresponded with the friendly aliens and those to be avoided. The other group completed the categorization task without the labels. Even though all participants had the same amount of practice categorizing the aliens, the group that learned names for the two kinds of aliens learned to categorize them much faster.
These results suggest that regardless of familiarity, having different names for things makes it easier to place them into the correct categories. In other words, a Southern Californian could differentiate the many different types of snow just as well as an Eskimo, as long as they learned the proper labels.
Language Is Not Just for Talking: Redundant Labels Facilitate Learning of Novel Categories. Gary Lupyan, David H. Rakison, and James L. McClelland. Psychological Science 18 (12), 1077–1083. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.02028.x (December 2007).
Abstract. In addition to having communicative functions, verbal labels may play a role in shaping concepts. Two experiments assessed whether the presence of labels affected category formation. Subjects learned to categorize "aliens" as those to be approached or those to be avoided. After accuracy feedback on each response was provided, a nonsense label was either presented or not. Providing nonsense category labels facilitated category learning even though the labels were redundant and all subjects had equivalent experience with supervised categorization of the stimuli. A follow-up study investigated differences between learning verbal and nonverbal associations and showed that learning a nonverbal association did not facilitate categorization. The findings show that labels make category distinctions more concrete and bear directly on the language-and-thought debate.
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