Inductive judgments about natural categories

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The present study examined the effects of semantic structure on simple inductive judgments about category members. For a particular category (e.g., mammals), subjects were told that one of the species (e.g., horses) had a given property (an unknown disease) and were asked to estimate the proportion of instances in the other species that possessed the property. The results indicated that category structure—in particular, the typicality of the species—influenced subjects' judgments. These results were interpreted by models based on the following assumption: When little is known about the underlying distribution of a property, subjects assume that the distribution mirrors that of better-known properties. For this reason, if subjects learn that an unknown property is possessed by a typical species (i.e., one that shares many of its properties with other category members), they are more likely to generalize than if the same fact had been learned about an atypical species.

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      We then develop our proposal in greater detail and offer an overview of the four experiments we go on to report. People judge some category members as more typical than others (e.g., a robin is more typical than an emu for the category of birds), and this graded structure is one of the most robust phenomena in research on conceptual representation (e.g., Murphy, 2002; Rips, 1975; Rips et al., 1973; Rosch, 1973; Rosch & Mervis, 1975). Typicality has important consequences for how people use concepts to learn and reason in their daily lives: Typical category members come to mind more readily (Anglin, 1986; Rosner & Hayes, 1977), are often learned first (Bjorklund & Thompson, 1983; Rosch et al., 1976; Mervis & Pani, 1980; Rosch et al., 1976), and serve as the basis for people’s inferences about what other category members are like (Osherson et al., 1990; Rips, 1975).

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    The author's address is Department of Behavioral Sciences, University of Chicago, 5848 S. University Avenue, Chicago, Illinois, 60637.

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