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Reply to ‘Single and multiple systems in probabilistic categorization’

Nature Reviews Psychology volume 4, page 65 (2025)Cite this article

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In any categorization task, participants can use declarative strategies or implicit ‘strategies’ such as the learning of distributional information or category boundaries without awareness. However, as we presented in our Review1 (Minda, J. P., Roark, C. L., Kalra, P. & Cruz, A. Single and multiple systems in categorization and category learning. Nat. Rev. Psychol. 3, 536–551 (2024))1, category learning tasks are often constructed with the goal of steering participants towards or away from certain strategies or testing particular accounts of category learning. In their Correspondence, Marchant and Chaigneau posit that evidence of explicit strategy use in probabilistic categorization tasks challenges multiple-systems accounts of categorization (Marchant, N. & Chaigneau, S. E. Single and multiple systems in probabilistic categorization. Nat. Rev. Psychol. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-024-00389-8 (2025))2.

Probabilistic categorization tasks were initially designed to undermine declarative learning strategies by providing only probabilistic feedback, such that any rule would produce a correct classification only some of the time3. However, evidence demonstrates that participants use a variety of strategies when attempting probabilistic categorization tasks, including declarative strategies4,5,6. Thus, performance on probabilistic categorization tasks cannot simply be interpreted as an indicator of implicit or procedural category learning; strategy modelling5,6 or other methods should be used to investigate implicit category learning in probabilistic tasks. For instance, one-cue and singleton strategies such as verbalized rules reflect declarative learning, whereas multi-cue strategies such as classifying an item on the basis of similarity to a cluster of exemplars often reflect implicit learning (because explicit multi-cue tracking would be impossible for most people, given observed limits on working memory capacity4). Further, a study using strategy modelling found that most participants (70%) used a multi-cue implicit strategy in the probabilistic categorization task7 and there was a significant correlation between performance on implicit category learning and probabilistic categorization tasks7.

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References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Western University, London, Ontario, Canada

    Priya Kalra, John Paul Minda & Anthony Cruz

  2. Department of Psychology, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, USA

    Casey L. Roark

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  1. Priya Kalra
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  2. John Paul Minda
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  4. Anthony Cruz
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Correspondence to John Paul Minda.

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Kalra, P., Minda, J.P., Roark, C.L. et al. Reply to ‘Single and multiple systems in probabilistic categorization’. Nat Rev Psychol 4, 65 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-024-00390-1

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