Research article summary (published 30 Aug 2009):

Induction with uncertain categories: When do people consider the category alternatives?

Full Abstract

These three experiments examined how people make property inferences about exemplars whose category membership is uncertain. Participants were shown two categories and a novel exemplar with a feature that indicated that the exemplar was more likely to belong to one category (target) than to the other (nontarget). Participants then made categorization decisions and property inferences about the novel exemplar. In some conditions, property inferences could be made only by considering both target and nontarget categories. In other conditions, predictions could be based on both categories or on the target category alone. Consistent with previous studies (e.g., Murphy & Ross, 1994, 2005), we found that many people made predictions based only on consideration of the target category. However, the prevalence of such single-category reasoning was greatly reduced by highlighting the costs of neglecting nontarget alternatives and by asking for inferences before categorization decisions. The results suggest that previous work may have exaggerated the prevalence of single-category reasoning and that people may be more flexible in their use of multiple categories in property inference than has been previously recognized.

Author information

Author/s: Hayes, Brett K (BK); Newell, Ben R (BR);

Affiliation: University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. b.hayes(-atsign-)unsw.edu.au

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: Memory & cognition (Mem Cognit), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2009-Sep; vol 37 (issue 6) : pp 730-43

Dates: Created 2009/08/14; Completed 2009/10/19;

PMID: 19679854, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 10/19/2009, IMS Date: )

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Adult Association Learning Classification - methods Decision Making Diagnosis, Differential Female

Female Generalization (Psychology) Humans Male Probability Learning Uncertainty

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