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This article reviews two aspects of human learning: (1) people draw inferences that appear to rely on hierarchical conceptual representations; (2) some categories are much easier to learn than others given the same number of exemplars, and some categories remain difficult despite extensive training. Both of these results are difficult to reconcile with a learning and categorization system that operates only on specific exemplars. More generally, the article argues that specifying the empirical phenomena that a radical exemplar does not predict would aid in clarifying the radical exemplar proposal. 

What affects whether one person represents an item in a similar way to another person? We examined the role of verbal labels in promoting representational alignment. Three groups of participants sorted novel shapes on perceived similarity. Prior to sorting, participants in two of the groups were pre-exposed to the shapes using a simple visual matching task and in one of these groups, shapes were accompanied by one of two novel category labels. Exposure with labels led people to represent the shapes in a more categorical way and to increased alignment between sorters, despite the two categories being visually distinct and participants in both pre-exposure conditions receiving identical visual experience of the shapes. Results hint that labels play a role in aligning people's mental representations, even in the absence of communication 

Do people perceive shapes to be similar based purely on their physical features? Or is visual similarity influenced by top-down knowledge? In the present studies, we demonstrate that top-down information – in the form of verbal labels that people associate with visual stimuli – predicts visual similarity as measured using subjective (Experiment 1) and objective (Experiment 2) tasks. In Experiment 1, shapes that were previously calibrated to be (putatively) perceptually equidistant were more likely to be grouped together if they shared a name. In Experiment 2, more nameable shapes were easier for participants to discriminate from other images, again controlling for their perceptual distance. We discuss what these results mean for constructing visual stimuli spaces that are perceptually uniform and discuss theoretical implications of the fact that perceptual similarity is sensitive to top-down information such as the ease with which an object can be named.