According to Shepard, Hovland, and Jenkins (1961), what happens when only one dimension is relevant in categorisation?

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When considering Shepard, Hovland, and Jenkins (1961) and their findings on categorization, several possibilities about attention and dimension relevance emerge.
Option 1: 'Selective attention focuses on that dimension.' This aligns with the classic result: if only one dimension is relevant for categorizing stimuli, learners tend to focus their attention on that single diagnostic dimension and ignore the others, facilitating rule-guided categorization.
Option 2: 'Participants learn the exceptions to the category before they learn the rule.' This describes a different learning sequence (perhaps more aligned with exemplar-based or rule-discovery tasks involving exceptions), but it does not reflect the single-dimension relevance result emphasized in the study, where the rule itself becomes salient rather than a focus on exceptions first.
Option 3: 'Participants learn that category more slowly than a category where all of the dimensions are relevant.' If only one dimension matters, the task should be simpler and learned more quickly, not more slowly, so this statement contradicts the demonstrated efficiency of single-dimension categorization.
Option 4: 'Participants attend to all of the dimensions of the stimuli.' This would be the case if all dimensions were equally diagnostic; however, the key finding in the single-dimension condition is that attention is narrowed to the relevant dimension, not distributed across all dimensions.
In summary, the core idea is that when one dimension is the sole diagnostic cue, learners allocate their attention primarily to that dimension, filtering out non-diagnostic dimensions to form the category rule.

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According to Shepard, Hovland, and Jenkins (1961), what happens when only one dimension is relevant in categorisation?

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