Yet another look at thirty categorization results

We re-analyzed thirty data sets reported in the literature and summarized by Smith and Minda (2000), based on Medin and Schaffer’s (1978) 5-4 structure. In their meta-analysis, Smith and Minda (2000) focused on comparing the prototype and the exemplar model. In our meta-analysis, we applied the vary-ing abstraction model, a multiple-prototype model proposed by Vanpaemel, Storms, and Ons (2005), that reduces to the prototype and the exemplar model in special cases. While we found a lot of heterogeneity in the best performing model across data sets, overall, the exemplar model turned out to ac-count for the data best. However, a slight modification of the exemplar model improved performance in one condition, while in another condition, a modification of the prototype model re-covered the data best. Although categorization is an essential and thoroughly studied cognitive task, the debate about which model de-scribes human category learning best hasn’t settled yet. Two theories have been dominating this debate. According to the prototype theory (Nosofsky, 1987; Reed, 1972), people store an abstract summary of a category and categorize a new item by comparing the item to the summary. According to the ex-emplar theory (Medin & Schaffer, 1978; Nosofsky, 1986), people do not make any abstraction at all. Instead, a category is represented by stored memories of all previously encoun-tered category exemplars. A new item is categorized by com-paring it to all the category exemplars. Due to the influen-tial studies of Medin and his colleagues, the focus has shifted from prototype theory to exemplar theory (Medin, Dewey, &amp