A large literature suggests that the way we process information is influenced by the categories that we have learned. We examined whether, when we try to uniquely encode items in working memory, the information encoded depends on the other stimuli being simultaneously learned. Participants were required to memorize unknown aliens, presented one at the time, for immediate recognition of their features. Some aliens, called twins, were organized into pairs that shared every feature (nondiscriminative feature) except one (discriminative feature), while some other aliens, called hermits, did not share feature. We reasoned that if people develop unsupervised categories by creating a category for a pair of aliens, we should observe better feature identification performance for nondiscriminative features compared to hermit features, but not compared to discriminative features. On the contrary, if distinguishing features draw attention, we should observe better performance when a discriminative rather than nondiscriminative feature was probed. Overall, our results suggest that when items share features, people code items in working memory by focusing on similarities between items, establishing clusters of items in an unsupervised fashion not requiring feedback on cluster membership.

中文翻译：

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项目共享功能时，人们如何在工作记忆中编码信息？

大量文献表明，我们处理信息的方式受我们所学类别的影响。当我们尝试对工作记忆中的项目进行唯一编码时，我们检查了编码的信息是否取决于同时学习的其他刺激。要求参加者记住当时出现的陌生外星人，以立即识别其特征。一些称为双胞胎的外星人被组织成对，它们共享除一个特征（非歧视性特征）外的所有特征（非歧视性特征），而另一些被称为隐士的外星人则不共享特征。我们认为，如果人们通过为一对外星人创建类别来开发无监督类别，则与隐性特征相比，对于非歧视性特征，我们应该观察到更好的特征识别性能，但不能与区别特征进行比较。相反，如果区别特征引起注意，则在探究区分性而非非歧视性特征时，我们应该观察到更好的性能。总体而言，我们的结果表明，当项目共享功能时，人们通过关注项目之间的相似性，以无人监督的方式建立项目集群，从而无需对集群成员进行反馈，就可以在工作记忆中对项目进行编码。