Explanations in Category Representation and Processing

人们如何学习、修正和推理日常的生物学、物理学、人工制品和社会类别？ 在五个行为实验中，我们将研究与新奇的、但似乎合理的日常类别相关的属性之间的相互关系的因果知识的存在和结构。 同时，在析因设计中，与类别成员相关的属性的几何结构将被操纵。 实验操作改变了这些背景信息的存在和结构：参与者将被指导信息组织成“共同原因”，“共同效应”，“线性链”或“无相互关系”模式。 然后测量这些最近学习的背景信息对学习、分类、归纳推理和相似性判断的影响。 信息的影响，否定这些概念的先验知识也将被研究，作为一个功能的参与者的信念aboutcausal结构的类别。这些结果将有助于我们进一步了解类别表示和基于类别的推理的理论和实践。 这项研究解决了许多关于日常知识和推理的哲学和心理学问题。 研究结果与科学教育直接相关：我们如何学习一般的背景科学信息，然后将这些知识与特定的科学概念联系起来。

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.