Context and Classification Learning

这个项目关注的是人们如何学习、使用和更新他们的概念和类别。分类是推理的基础，因为人类的语言和思想是由概念组成并围绕概念组织起来的。该项目的一个特别重点是更全面地了解如何将以前的知识和经验与新信息相结合以确定概念。例如，许多科学教育涉及学习新的术语和概念，而且有相当多的证据表明，以前的知识有时会导致对新信息的误解和误解。在其他情况下，先验知识无疑是有帮助的。显然，我们需要更多地了解知识和经验是如何结合起来决定我们学到什么。这个研究项目有几个不同的目的。一个目标是评估是什么让一些类别容易自然地学习，而什么让其他类别不自然而难以学习。一个相关的目标是进一步发展和测试类别学习的定量和计算模型。一组研究将在学习示例具有复杂分层结构的环境中评估这些模型。第二项工作将研究不同视角对概念不同属性的感知深度或中心性的影响。第三组实验将研究抽象的建议或理论如何与类别学习中的具体例子相结合。与理论（或精神诊断分类中的诊断标准）相关的类别描述通常比类别中单个实例的属性或行为要抽象得多。该项目的总体目标是了解这些抽象的知识结构如何与具体的、情境化的经验联系起来，以确定概念的形成。这项工作的潜在应用范围从科学教育到诊断分类是一项重要活动的任何情况。

This project is concerned with how people learn about, use, and update their concepts and categories. Categorization is fundamental to reasoning, because human language and thought is made up of and organized around concepts. A particular focus of the project is to understand more fully how previous knowledge and experience are integrated with new information to determine concepts. For example, much of science education involves learning new terms and concepts, and there is considerable evidence that previous knowledge sometimes leads to misconceptions and misinterpretations of new information. In other cases, prior knowledge is unambiguously helpful. Clearly we need to know much more about how knowledge and experience combine to determine what is learned. The research project has several distinct aims. One goal is to evaluate what makes some categories easy and natural to learn and what makes other categories unnatural and difficult to learn. A related goal is to develop further and to test quantitative and computational models of category learning. One set of studies will evaluate these models in contexts where the learning examples have a complex, hierarchical structure. A second line of work will study the effects of different perspectives on the perceived depth or centrality of different properties of concepts. A third set of experiments will study how abstract advice or theories is combined with concrete examples in category learning. The category descriptions associated with theories (or diagnostic criteria in psychodiagnostic classification) are often much more abstract than the properties or behaviors of individual instances of a category. The overall goal of the project is to understand how these abstract knowledge sturctures become linked with specific, contextualized experience to determine concept formation. Potential applications of this work range from science education to any of a number of situations where diagnostic classification is an important activity.