TY - GEN
T1 - Progressive Alignment Facilitates Learning of Deterministic But Not Probabilistic Relational Categories
AU - Jung, Wookyoung
AU - Hummel, John E.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© CogSci 2011.
PY - 2011
Y1 - 2011
N2 - 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).
AB - 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).
KW - Relational category learning
KW - deterministic category structure
KW - probabilistic category structure
KW - progressive alignment
KW - relational invariants
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M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84926511641
T3 - Expanding the Space of Cognitive Science - Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2011
SP - 2643
EP - 2648
BT - Expanding the Space of Cognitive Science - Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2011
A2 - Carlson, Laura
A2 - Hoelscher, Christoph
A2 - Shipley, Thomas F.
PB - The Cognitive Science Society
T2 - 33rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Expanding the Space of Cognitive Science, CogSci 2011
Y2 - 20 July 2011 through 23 July 2011
ER -