ABSTRACT
The effects of limited processing time were investigated for the binary categorization of artificial multidimensional objects. Following Lamberts and Freeman (1999), in the first stage of the experiment participants learnt to categorize 9 stimuli into two categories. In the second stage, the same stimuli were presented for categorization, and both the display time, and the time available in which to make a decision, were varied independently. It was found that each of these variables had a significant effect on accuracy of categorization, as well as response latency. Lamberts and Freeman (1999) demonstrated that restricting presentation time of a certain stimulus in their category structure caused a reversal in category assignment. We found evidence of the same reversal, but it was dependent on the time available to make a decision rather than the duration of stimulus display. Importantly, changes in accuracy due to response deadline were not explicable in terms of truncation of processing by the limited time. The study provides an empirical investigation of the intuitive notion that both perceptual processing and decision making components are time dependent.
