Understanding individual differences in representational abstraction: The role of working memory capacity

Several studies have reported differences in categorization strategies among participants: some learn a category by making abstraction across the category members while others use a memorization strategy. Despite the prevalence of these differences, little attention has been paid to investigating what influences some to use an abstraction strategy and others a memorization strategy. The current study had two goals: in a first experiment we investigated whether these differences were stable across time, using the parallel form method often used in psychometric research, and in a second experiment we investigated whether the individual differences in categorization strategy were related to working memory capacity. We used a modelling strategy, in which we not only focused on full abstraction and memorization strategies, but also on intermediate strategies in which some category members are abstracted and others are not. The first study revealed that the individual abstraction strategy of individual participants in two different experiments, performed at different times, correlate significantly, and second study showed that these individual differences were related to the working memory capacity of the participants.