ABSTRACT
In short, the attainment of a concept has about it something of a quantal character. It is as if the mastery of a conceptual distinction were able to mask the preconceptual memory of the things distinguished. In studying concept attainment, then, it has been aim to externalize for observation as many of the decisions as could possibly be brought into the open in the hope that regularities in these decisions basis for making inferences about the processes involved in learning or attaining a concept. Many of the classic experiments in concept attainment, beginning with Hull's famous study, have employed rote-memory instructions. Leading their subjects to believe that their task was to memorize the labels of different figures presented to them rather, than to seek to discover what were the defining properties of instances bearing the same labels. In the appendix, Roger Brown proposes that one of the functions of words is to alert people to the possibilities of concept attainment.
