Modeling artificial category learning from pixels: Revisiting Shepard, Hovland, and Jenkins (1961) with deep neural networks

Recent work has paired classic category learning models with convolutional neural networks (CNNs), allowing researchers to study categorization behavior from raw image inputs. However, this research typically uses naturalistic images, which assess participant responses to existing categories; yet, much of traditional category learning research has focused on using novel, artificial stimuli to examine the learning process behind how people acquire categories. In this work, we pair a CNN with ALCOVE (Kruschke, 1992), a well-known exemplar model of categorization, and attempt to examine whether this model can reproduce the classic type ordering effect from Shepard, Hovland, and Jenkins (1961) on raw images rather than abstract features. We examine this question with a variety of CNN architectures and image datasets and compare ALCOVE-CNN to two other models that lacked certain key features of ALCOVE. We found that our ALCOVE-CNN model could reproduce the type ordering effect more often than the other models we tested, but in limited situations. Our results showed that success varied greatly across the various configurations we tested, suggesting that the feature representations from CNNs provide strong constraints in properly capturing this effect.