Information about the logical structure of a category affects generalization

Abstract

This paper considers whether information about the logical structure of a category affects how people generalize. We carried out three experiments with the following structure: participants were first presented with a set of training items, and were subsequently asked to decide whether new items belonged to the same category as the training items. Each experiment had two conditions that differed only in terms of the category label provided for the training items; different category labels conveyed different information about the logical structure of the category to which the training items were supposed to belong. In all cases, participants' generalization was greatly affected by such information. Our results suggest that people make the default assumption that category labels correspond to groupings of highly similar objects.

Expectations about stimulus structure in implicit learning

“…Markman and Hutchinson (1984) observed that the presence of a category label leads children to generalize in a taxonomic instead of a thematic way. With adult participants, Pothos, Chater, and Stewart (2004) showed that default labels will tend to be associated with objects that are highly similar to each other. In addition, an assumption about whether or not a set of objects belongs to linearly separable categories appears to depend on the thematic content of the objects (Wattenmaker, 1995;Wattenmaker, Dewey, Murphy, & Medin, 1986).…”

Context Effects on Musical Chord Categorization: Different Forms of Top‐Down Feedback in Speech and Music?

“…It is interesting to note that this parallels work in visual categorization examining the difference between logically related categories (e.g., A vs. not A; Goldstone, 1996;Pothos, Chater, & Stewart, 2004). For example, in Goldstone's (1996) study, Experiment 3 assessed the effect of making an A/not-A decision, as opposed to an A/B.…”

Finding abstract commonalties of category members

“…Research in analogical transfer and problem solving showed that finding structural commonalties between concepts is not automatic; it often requires domainspecific background knowledge and expertise Holyoak 1980, 1983;Chi, Feltovich and Glaser 1981). I argue that mere reference to category labels is sufficient to provide background knowledge and expectation about how members of a category are organised (Brown 1957;Markman and Hutchinson 1984;Gelman and Markman 1986;Flagnnagan, Fried and Holyoak 1986;Markman 1989;Gelman and Heyman 1999;Yamauchi and Markman 2000a;Yamauchi et al 2002;Pothos et al 2004;Yamauchi 2005;Yamauchi and Yu 2008; but also see Sloutsky 2003; Sloutsky and Fisher 2004 for an opposing view). Studies have shown that people have an implicit idea about how attributes of a category are interrelated (Sloman, Love and Ahn 1998), and use that knowledge to make a classification or feature inference (Rehder and Hastie 2001).…”

“…Even when categories are organised arbitrarily with geometric stimuli, category labels generate an expectation that members of a category have some attributes in common (Yamauchi, Love and Markman 2002;Pothos, Chater and Stewart 2004). Children between the ages of two and four understand noun labels as representing a group of related objects, rather than a group of attributes (Markman and Hutchinson 1984;Gelman and Markman 1986;Markman 1999).…”