Context and Classification Learning

这个项目关注的是人们如何学习，使用， 更新他们的概念和类别。 分类是 是推理的基础，因为人类的语言和思想 由概念组成并围绕概念组织的。 的一个特别重点 这个项目是为了更全面地了解以前的知识 和经验与新信息相结合，以确定 理念的 例如，许多科学教育涉及 学习新的术语和概念， 先前的知识有时会导致 对新信息的误解和误解。 在 在其他情况下，先验知识无疑是有帮助的。 明确 我们需要更多地了解知识和经验 联合收割机来确定学到了什么。 这个研究项目有几个明确的目标。 一个目标是 评估是什么让一些类别容易和自然学习， 是什么让其他类别不自然和难以学习。 一 相关的目标是进一步发展和测试定量和 类别学习的计算模型。 一组研究 我将在学习的背景下评估这些模型， 示例具有复杂的分层结构。 第二线 的工作将研究的影响，不同的观点对 不同属性的感知深度或中心性 理念的 第三组实验将研究如何抽象 建议或理论与类别中的具体实例相结合 学习 与理论（或诊断）相关的类别描述 心理诊断分类的标准）往往更多 比单个实例的属性或行为更抽象 一个类别。 该项目的总体目标是了解 这些抽象的知识结构是如何与 确定概念的具体背景经验 阵 这项工作的潜在应用范围从 科学教育中的任何一种情况， 诊断分类是一项重要的活动。

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.