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Perruchet (1994) suggested that 'neither a specific-item retrieval process nor abstractive capacity' is required to explain Vokey and Brooks (1992) results, which instead can be accounted for in terms of knowledge of item fragrments. The literature contains 2 definitions of abstractive. Rejecting abstractive in the sense of nonliteral units requires rejecting the results of studies on changed-letter transfer, some of which do not need the control group Perruchet claims and thus stand, confirming nonliteral (relational) abstraction. However, the rejection of pooled across items abstraction even in the form of our proposed retrieval-time pooling is feasible, which we had not previously appreciated. Perruchet's rejection of item retrieval ignores Vokey and Brooks' coding and retrieval variations. The coding and retrieval results cannot be ignored simply because they are nonstandard, however. Integrating this literature with known memory phenomena requires incorporating these processing factors, rather than assuming fixed, literal fragments.

Four experiments examined sensitivity to feature frequencies and feature correlations as a function of intentional and incidental concept learning. Feature frequencies were encoded equally well across variations in learning strategies, and although classification decisions in both intentional and incidental conditions preserved correlated features, this sensitivity was achieved through different processes. With intentional learning, sensitivity to correlations resulted from explicit rules, whereas incidental encoding preserved correlations through a similarity-based analogical process. In incidental tasks that promoted exemplar storage, classification decisions were mediated by similarity to retrieved examples, and correlated features were indirectly preserved in this process. The results are discussed in terms of the diversity of encoding processes and representations that can occur with incidental category learning.