Categorization and Reasoning Among Expert Populations

在他们的一生中，人们不断地获得、提炼和更新概念。这些概念和范畴被用来理解、推理和预测世界上的行动和事件。尽管研究已经为人们如何获得和使用概念提供了很好的信息基础，但目前的理论和数据侧重于相对新手群体中的类别学习和组织。到目前为止，我们的发现表明，关于概念行为的关键概括可能不适用于更多的专家群体。此外，我们的发现揭示了分类和在推理中使用范畴的新原则，这是目前的理论所没有解决的。该项目将继续调查类别的组织和使用如何随着目标和经验的变化而变化。我们的研究人群包括不同的文化和不同类型的专业知识。我们已经开始开发基于范畴推理的新模型，所提出的研究将为一种新的归纳推理理论提供实证检验。这个项目构成了对人类认知的基础研究，但它与各种实际情况有关，如科学教育。

Throughout their life people continually acquire, refine and update concepts. These concepts and categories are use to understand, reason about, and make predictions concerning actions and events in the world. Although studies have provided a good base of information on how people acquire and use concepts, current theory and data are weighted toward category learning and organization among populations of relative novices. Our findings to date suggest that key generalizations concerning conceptual behavior may not hold for more expert populations. In addition our findings are revealing new principles of categorization and the use of categories in reasoning which are not addressed by current theories. This project will continue to investigate how the organization and use of categories changes as a function of goals and experience. Our study populations include different cultures as well as different types of expertise. We have begun to develop new models for category-based reasoning and the proposed studies will provide empirical tests of a new theory of inductive reasoning. This project constitutes basic research on human cognition but it is relevant to a variety of practical contexts such a science education.