Explanations in Category Representation and Processing

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How do people learn, revise, and reason about everyday biological,physics, artifact, and social categories? The presence and structure ofcausal knowledge about the interrelations among the properties associatedwith novel, but plausible everyday categories will be studied in five behavioralexperiments. At the same time, in a factorial design, the statisticalstructure of the properties associated with members of the categories willbe manipulated. The experimental manipulations vary the presence andstructure of this background information: participants will be tutored oninformation organized into "common-cause," "common effect," "linearchain," or "no inter-relationship" schemas. Then the effects of thisrecently learned background information on learning, classification,inductive inferences and similarity judgments will be measured. Theimpact of information that disconfirms prior knowledge of these conceptswill also be studied, as a function of the participant's beliefs aboutcausal structure of the categories. The results will advance ourtheoretical and practical knowledge about category representation andcategory-based reasoning. The research addresses many philosophical andpsychological questions about everyday knowledge and reasoning. Theresults are directly relevant to science education: How do we learngeneral, background scientific information and then relate that knowledgeto specific scientific concepts.