The Influence of Pre-specified Targets on Categorisation Tasks

For human observers, the task of recognising faces involves exploiting low-level cues to rapidly discern higher-level social category membership, including race or species. Much of the research exploring this phenomenon employs pre-specified target categorisation tasks, yet the potential for variance across such tasks to impact upon outcomes remains relatively uninvestigated. With this in mind, we compared outcomes when performing two different types of face categorisation tasks: 'Target X or Target Y' versus 'Target X or not' and 'Target Y or not'. Data reveal task-dependent differences, and the implications of these findings for models of vision-based categorisation are discussed.