Progressive Alignment Facilitates Learning of Deterministic But Not Probabilistic Relational Categories

Wookyoung Jung, John E. Hummel

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Kotovsky and Gentner (1996) showed that presenting progressively aligned examples helped children discover relational similarities: Comparisons based on initially concrete and highly similar, but progressively more abstract exemplars helped the discovery of higher-order relational similarities. We investigated whether progressive alignment can aid learning of relational categories with either a deterministic (in which one relation reliably predicts category membership) or a probabilistic structure (in which each relation predicts category membership with 75% reliability). Progressive alignment helped participants learn relational categories with the deterministic structure. However, progressive alignment did not help participants learn the probabilistic relational categories. The results show that learning relational categories with a deterministic structure can be improved by progressive alignment, consistent with previous findings (e.g., Kotovsky & Gentner, 1996), but also support previous findings suggesting that relational categories are represented as a schemas, which are learned by a process of intersection discovery that fails catastrophically with probabilistic category structures (Jung & Hummel, 2009; Kittur et al., 2004, 2006).

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationExpanding the Space of Cognitive Science - Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2011
EditorsLaura Carlson, Christoph Hoelscher, Thomas F. Shipley
PublisherThe Cognitive Science Society
Pages2643-2648
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)9780976831877
StatePublished - 2011
Externally publishedYes
Event33rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Expanding the Space of Cognitive Science, CogSci 2011 - Boston, United States
Duration: Jul 20 2011Jul 23 2011

Publication series

NameExpanding the Space of Cognitive Science - Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2011

Conference

Conference33rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Expanding the Space of Cognitive Science, CogSci 2011
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityBoston
Period7/20/117/23/11

Keywords

  • Relational category learning
  • deterministic category structure
  • probabilistic category structure
  • progressive alignment
  • relational invariants

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Cognitive Neuroscience

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