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 varying 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 account 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 recovered the data best.11status: publishe