Categorical biases and memory performance. To ensure that there were no interaction effects across
tasks, participants’ performance on the shape bias task was analyzed. Each participant was classified
as having/not having a categorical bias using the same classification procedure as that outlined in
Experiment 1. Table 1 outlines the breakdown of bias by prompt condition group for Experiment 3.
The majority of the adults demonstrated a shape bias; this finding replicates the findings of Experiments
1 and 2. A series of Pearson’s chi-square analyses on the data presented in Table 1, Experiment
3, revealed no significant differences in performance on the shape bias task across the prompt conditions
(ps > .10). Thus, there were no interaction effects between the shape bias task and prompt conditions
of the feature memory task. These results suggest that the language used during the feature
memory task did not influence the way in which participants were encoding and retrieving
knowledge.
General discussion