 Category verification

Category verification is a task in which a person decides whether an example belongs to a stated category. A participant might judge “a robin is a bird” as true and “a robin is a fish” as false. Researchers measure accuracy and reaction time while controlling features such as wording, familiarity and the expected response.

The task is useful because equally correct category members need not be verified equally quickly. However, response speed concerns the categorization process, not a mathematical degree of membership. Sharon Lee Armstrong and colleagues compared typicality judgments with classification for well-defined categories such as odd integers, showing why graded judgments alone need not imply fuzzy category boundaries.^[ref]