Making Probabilistic Relational Categories Learnable

Theories of relational concept acquisition (e.g., schema induction) based on structured intersection discovery predict that relational concepts with a probabilistic (i.e., family resemblance) structure ought to be extremely difficult to learn. We report four experiments testing this prediction by investigating conditions hypothesized to facilitate the learning of such categories. Experiment 1 showed that changing the task from a category-learning task to choosing the "winning" object in each stimulus greatly facilitated participants' ability to learn probabilistic relational categories. Experiments 2 and 3 further investigated the mechanisms underlying this "who's winning" effect. Experiment 4 replicated and generalized the "who's winning" effect with more natural stimuli. Together, our findings suggest that people learn relational concepts by a process of intersection discovery akin to schema induction, and that any task that encourages people to discover a higher order relation that remains invariant over members of a category will facilitate the learning of putatively probabilistic relational concepts.

[1]  Micah B. Goldwater,et al.  Categorizing entities by common role , 2011, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[2]  John E. Hummel,et al.  Symbolic Versus Associative Learning , 2010, Cogn. Sci..

[3]  R. Shiffrin,et al.  A model for recognition memory: REM—retrieving effectively from memory , 1997, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[4]  Refractor.  Vision , 2000, The Lancet.

[5]  Leonidas A A Doumas,et al.  A theory of the discovery and predication of relational concepts. , 2008, Psychological review.

[6]  I. Biederman.  Recognition-by-components: a theory of human image understanding. , 1987, Psychological review.

[7]  Dedre Gentner,et al.  Structure-Mapping: A Theoretical Framework for Analogy , 1983, Cogn. Sci..

[8]  M. Kalish,et al.  The dimensionality of perceptual category learning: A state-trace analysis , 2010, Memory & cognition.

[9]  S. Gelman,et al.  The Essential Child : Origins of Essentialism in Everyday Thought , 2003 .

[10]  J. Kruschke,et al.  ALCOVE: an exemplar-based connectionist model of category learning. , 1992, Psychological review.

[11]  J. D. Smith,et al.  Formal Approaches in Categorization: Prototype models of categorization: basic formulation, predictions, and limitations , 2011 .

[12]  G. Lakoff.  Women, fire, and dangerous things : what categories reveal about the mind , 1989 .

[13]  S. Gelman.  Psychological essentialism in children , 2004, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[14]  E. Heit,et al.  Models of the effects of prior knowledge on category learning. , 1994, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[15]  Aniket Kittur,et al.  Using Ideal Observers in Higher-order Human Category Learning , 2006 .

[16]  Aniket Kittur,et al.  Feature- vs. Relation-Defined Categories: Probab(alistic)ly Not the Same , 2004 .

[17]  K. Holyoak,et al.  A symbolic-connectionist theory of relational inference and generalization. , 2003, Psychological review.

[18]  F. Keil.  Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development , 1989 .

[19]  John E. Hummel,et al.  Distributed representations of structure: A theory of analogical access and mapping. , 1997 .

[20]  D. Gentner.  The development of relational category knowledge , 2005 .

[21]  B. Ross,et al.  Abstract coherent categories. , 2001, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[22]  E. Rosch,et al.  Family resemblances: Studies in the internal structure of categories , 1975, Cognitive Psychology.

[23]  K. Holyoak,et al.  The Cambridge handbook of thinking and reasoning , 2005 .

[24]  A. Ortony,et al.  Similarity and Analogical Reasoning , 1991 .

[25]  L. Barsalou,et al.  Ad hoc categories , 1983, Memory & cognition.

[26]  S. Gelman,et al.  The role of essentialism in children's concepts. , 1999, Advances in child development and behavior.

[27]  D L Medin,et al.  Concepts and conceptual structure. , 1989, The American psychologist.

[28]  G. Lakoff,et al.  Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind , 1988 .

[29]  E John,et al.  A Process Model of Human Transitive Inference , 2001 .

[30]  F. Gregory Ashby,et al.  Formal Approaches in Categorization: COVIS , 2011 .

[31]  O. Lazareva,et al.  Relational learning in a context of transposition: a review. , 2012, Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior.

[32]  W. R. Buckland,et al.  Contributions to Probability and Statistics , 1960 .

[33]  Emmanuel M. Pothos,et al.  Formal Approaches in Categorization: Contents , 2011 .

[34]  Arthur B. Markman,et al.  Role-governed categories , 2001, J. Exp. Theor. Artif. Intell..

[35]  Paul Thagard,et al.  Analogical Mapping by Constraint Satisfaction , 1989, Cogn. Sci..

[36]  J. Kruschke,et al.  A model of probabilistic category learning. , 1999, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[37]  Jennifer A. Asmuth,et al.  Context Sensitivity of Relational Nouns , 2005 .

[38]  William M. Smith,et al.  A Study of Thinking , 1956 .

[39]  M. Engelmann.  The Philosophical Investigations , 2013 .

[40]  K. Holyoak,et al.  Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought , 1994 .

[41]  F. Keil,et al.  Two dogmas of conceptual empiricism: implications for hybrid models of the structure of knowledge , 1998, Cognition.

[42]  N. Chater,et al.  Proceedings of the fourteenth annual conference of the cognitive science society , 1992 .

[43]  D. Medin,et al.  Comments on part I: psychological essentialism , 1989 .

[44]  Micah B. Goldwater,et al.  The empirical case for role-governed categories , 2011, Cognition.

[45]  Derek C. Penn,et al.  Darwin's mistake: Explaining the discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds , 2008, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[46]  Brian H. Ross,et al.  Food for Thought: Cross-Classification and Category Organization in a Complex Real-World Domain , 1999, Cognitive Psychology.

[47]  Noam Chomsky.  Review of B.F. Skinner, Verbal Behavior , 1959 .

[48]  J. Hummel,et al.  Attribute conjunctions and the part configuration advantage in object category learning. , 1996, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[49]  D. Medin,et al.  The role of theories in conceptual coherence. , 1985, Psychological review.

[50]  G. Murphy,et al.  The Big Book of Concepts , 2002 .

[51]  H. Levene.  Robust tests for equality of variances , 1961 .

[52]  John E. Hummel,et al.  Progressive Alignment Facilitates Learning of Deterministic But Not Probabilistic Relational Categories , 2011, CogSci.

[53]  K. Holyoak,et al.  Schema induction and analogical transfer , 1983, Cognitive Psychology.

[54]  Paul D. Allopenna,et al.  The locus of knowledge effects in concept learning. , 1994, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[55]  S. Carey.  Conceptual Change in Childhood , 1985 .

[56]  Arthur B Markman,et al.  Classification of exemplars with single- and multiple-feature manifestations: the effects of relevant dimension variation and category structure. , 2003, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[57]  Jonathan D. Cohen,et al.  Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society , 2011 .

[58]  Bradley C. Love,et al.  When learning to classify by relations is easier than by features , 2010 .

[59]  J. Hummel.  Complementary solutions to the binding problem in vision: Implications for shape perception and object recognition , 2001 .

[60]  Arthur B. Markman,et al.  What is typical about the typicality effect in category-based induction? , 2010, Memory & cognition.

[61]  K. Holyoak,et al.  Analogical problem solving , 1980, Cognitive Psychology.

[62]  Karin Ackermann,et al.  Categories and Concepts , 2003, Job 28. Cognition in Context.

[63]  B. Rehder.  A causal-model theory of conceptual representation and categorization. , 2003, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[64]  I. Biederman,et al.  Dynamic binding in a neural network for shape recognition. , 1992, Psychological review.

[65]  Donald Favareau.  The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain , 1998 .

[66]  William M. Smith,et al.  A Study of Thinking , 1956 .

[67]  P. Hayes,et al.  Analogy , 2000, Encyclopedic Dictionary of Archaeology.

[68]  J. Michael.  Verbal behavior. , 1984, Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior.

[69]  W. Ahn,et al.  Demystifying Theory-based Categorization , 2002 .

[70]  G. Miller,et al.  Cognitive science. , 1981, Science.