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category-adjustment

The pull a remembered category exerts on a specific memory — the detail drifts toward the prototype the way a river bends toward the sea, and finer categories make a shorter bend.

A child asked to remember "the red apple" will later recall a redder apple than it was, because "apple" pulls the memory toward the typical apple; asked to remember "the Fuji apple" the drift is smaller, because the finer category has a tighter center. The category-adjustment model (Huttenlocher) is one law across location, length, and duration: the category pulls only when it is used, so labels help a near-boundary value (pulling it home) and harm a sub-categorical one (pulling it away from its true detail).

The castle's rooms that lean on it: drift-across-dimensions names the law and finds it holds across dimensions, and atypical-expert-pull asks whether the expert's precision loosens the pull while conviction tightens it — the Bayesian flip for atypical exemplars that the model predicts but no experiment has caught.

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