Much of the knowledge people acquire is structured: number systems, taxonomies; chemical structures. Learning using the individual components that compose a structured theory may be difficult due to the memory load induced by remembering the entities and their relations. Though much research has demonstrated the effects of ordering on category learning, to our knowledge, none has been conducted...

Acquiring a second language phonetic contrast involves learning new sound categories from examples. Consequently, research in category learning should have important implications for research examining how a foreign sound contrast is acquired. The current project is an initial attempt to apply work in category learning to work in second language sound acquisition. Here, I advance that a cluster...

Learning to categorize objects involves learning which sources of variability are meaningful and which should be ignored or generalized. In this light, theories and models of category learning can be viewed as accounts of how people capture and represent meaningful variation. Similarity-based models, such as prototype and exemplar models, cannot correctly predict that humans classify a stimulus...

The aim of the current work is to incorporate structural information in judgments of similarity . According to the assumption of feature independence, how one feature affects similarity is independent of the values of the other features present. We present three violations of this assumption, all arising from the influence of relations between features and of relations between relations . A sha...

The rational model of categorization (RMC; Anderson, 1990) assumes that categories are learned by clustering similar stimuli together using Bayesian inference. As computing the posterior distribution over all assignments of stimuli to clusters is intractable, an approximation algorithm is used. The original algorithm used in the RMC was an incremental procedure that had no guarantees for the qu...

Three experiments examined the manner in which logic novices (i.e., college undergraduates) process and represent elementary and relational properties of propositional logic arguments. These experiments used an old/new recognition procedure under conditions in which participants had ample (Experiment 1) or limited time (Experiments 2 and 3) to encode these arguments. Results of these experiment...

According to structure-mapping theory. the process of comparison is one of alignment and mapping between representational structures. This process induces a focus on commonalities and alignable differences (i.e., those related to the commonalities). Nonalignable differences (i.e,, those not related to the commonalities) are held to be neglected. The theory thus predicts increased focus on the C...

From early childhood, human beings learn not only from collections of facts about the world, but also in social contexts: from observation of other people, from communication, and from explicit teaching. In these contexts, the data are the result of human actions—actions that come about because of people’s goals and intentions. To interpret the implications of others’ actions correctly, learner...

Two experiments examine the evolution of folkbiological reasoning in children (4 to 10 years of age) and adults from four distinct communities (rural Native American, rural majority culture, and suburban and urban North American communities). Using an adoption paradigm, we examine participants’ intuitions regarding the inheritance of properties and the mechanisms underlying the transmission of ...