dc.description.abstract | Labels hold a great amount of information and power, and they have been shown to affect perception and people‟s decisions when making categorical and similarity judgments. This study examines why reliance on labels found in previous studies is so common by exploring cognitive processes behind this labeling effect. We study how poor short-term visual memory, general assumptions, and an ability to think critically about one‟s own thinking relate to label use. Specifically, we investigated how visual working memory (VWM) ability, implicit beliefs, and metacognitive ability influence a participants‟ use of labels during a similarity judgment task. Participants were given a task to determine similarity between human faces. They were also given a VWM task and questionnaires to determine their implicit beliefs and metacognitive abilities. Our results indicate that VWM ability and implicit beliefs relate to the use of labels in certain conditions, with those having poor VWM ability using labels more and those whose implicit beliefs reflect an assumption that properties and traits in the world are fixed and intransient use labels more. Metacognitive abilities were not closely related to label use. These results suggest that the use of labels is not random or out of ease of use, but the result of certain cognitive processes. | en |