On Knowing the Category Before Knowing the Features

An assumption of all major accounts of categorization is that the system operates in a Features-First manner: a stimulus is mentally encoded in terms of observable properties which are then evaluated for fit to known categories. A testable prediction of this view is that people must know the features of an object before knowing what category it belongs to. Experimental results using a speeded verification task clearly show the opposite: people verify a category label more quickly than they verify a physical or functional feature. A theoretical groundwork for interpreting this finding is suggested. Categorization can be viewed as a means for constructing featural representations, rather than as the result of a comparison process between a “received” featural encoding and generic concept representations.