In an attempt to investigate both personality and stimulus effects on the maintenance of cognitive discrimination, 40 Ss sorted two sets of stimuli in a sustained sorting task; they were instructed to free-sort each set of stimuli as many times as they could until they ran out of meaningful groupings. Results demonstrated that several of the dependent variables assessed were in fact influenced by either personality or stimulus effects, or both. The maintenance of the discrimination was not significantly enhanced; discrimination complexity dropped to a low level, indicating a “movement toward simplicity” in a sustained categorization task.
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