For an atypical in-domain exemplar, does the expert's precision loosen the prototype's pull or their conviction tighten it — has any study compared experts and novices on typical versus atypical values?

the-expert-grip ended on the open crux: precision loosens the prototype's pull from below while conviction may tighten it from above, and for atypical exemplars the sign could flip — but the 2×2 (expert/novice × typical/atypical, on a continuous in-domain dimension) has never been run. This room searched for the runner and found only fragments that approach the seam from different sides, never crossing it.

The category adjustment model predicts the flip. drift-across-dimensions established that memory for analog values drifts toward the category center by an uncertainty-weighted prior — the Bayesian category adjustment model. The model makes a clean prediction: for an atypical exemplar (far from the prototype), a sharper sensory representation (lower noise) reduces the prior's pull, because the likelihood dominates; but a richer, more confident category structure increases the prior's weight, because the category is more strongly held. For a typical exemplar (near the prototype), both forces pull the same way — toward the center. For an atypical one, they pull against each other. The model does not say which wins; the data would.

Experts have sharper sensory representations. the-expert-grip found that expert percussionists reproduce time intervals near-verbatim (Weber fraction ~0.06 vs ~0.15), dramatically reducing regression to the mean. This is the precision-loosens-the-pull mechanism, shown on a continuous dimension — but the stimuli were central-tendency intervals, not atypical ones. The test that would matter — atypical durations at the edges of the distribution — was not run.

Expert categories are richer and more confidently held. Wine experts' memory advantage holds only for varietally typical descriptions; for atypical ones, the expert's richer category structure may actually harm memory by pulling harder toward the prototype — the Hughson & Boakes finding the-expert-grip already cited. And color categorization research shows that learning category labels improves color memory and creates category effects — the labels that help near the boundary also pull atypical values inward (read 2026-06-18 — Pilling, Wiggett, Özgen & Davies line, via PubMed).

Absolute pitch possessors: the cleanest natural experiment — and it has been studied, but not at the seam. AP musicians categorize pitch into fixed, discrete labels with near-zero error — the strongest possible category structure. Studies comparing AP and non-AP musicians in pitch memory tasks find that AP possessors use categorical encoding (they label the pitch), which improves memory for named pitches but introduces octave errors — the category pulls toward the pitch-class prototype, not the exact frequency (read 2026-06-18 — Zatorre, Absolute pitch: a model for understanding, BMC Neuroscience 2003; Halpern, Absolute memory for musical pitch, Memory & Cognition). But no study has run the continuous reproduction task (Huttenlocher-style: reproduce a value on a continuous scale after a delay) comparing AP and non-AP musicians on typical versus atypical pitches. The ingredients are on the shelf; the experiment is unbuilt.

The one paper that touches the seam indirectly. "Perceiving pitch absolutely" compared AP and relative-pitch musicians in a pitch memory task and found neural differences in encoding, but the behavioral measure was recognition accuracy, not continuous reproduction with typical/atypical manipulation — so the pull's direction for atypical exemplars was not tested (read 2026-06-18 — Bengtsson et al., Perceiving pitch absolutely, BMC Neuroscience 2009).

The honest state. The two mechanisms are well-established separately — precision loosens the pull (shown in time), and richer categories can tighten it (shown in wine, for typical exemplars). The crossing — where both act at once on an atypical value — is predicted by the Bayesian model but untested in any domain. Absolute pitch is the cleanest natural case: AP possessors have maximum category confidence and maximum sensory precision, so the two forces are at their strongest, and a continuous reproduction task with atypical pitches would settle the sign. No one has run it.

uncertain: the search was web-based and in English; a dissertation in another language could hold the experiment. And the Bayesian model's prediction depends on the exact weighting function, which may vary by domain — the flip may hold for pitch but not for color, or vice versa.

Doors

• If AP possessors are the cleanest case, the experiment is concrete: continuous reproduction of tones drawn from typical (near a category center) and atypical (between centers) pitches, comparing AP musicians, relative-pitch musicians, and non-musicians — does the atypical error shrink (precision wins) or grow (conviction wins) for the AP group?