University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Making probabilistic relational categories learnable

Jung, Wookyoung

Content Files
Wookyoung_Jung.pdf

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/42228

Description

Title
Making probabilistic relational categories learnable
Author(s)
Jung, Wookyoung
Issue Date
2013-02-03T19:28:33Z
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Hummel, John E.
Committee Member(s)
Ross, Brian H.
Department of Study
Psychology
Discipline
Psychology
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
M.A.
Degree Level
Thesis
Date of Ingest
2013-02-03T19:28:33Z
Keyword(s)
  • Relational category learning
  • family resemblance
  • higher-order relations
  • relational invariants
  • who’s winning task
Abstract
Kittur, Hummel and Holyoak (2004) showed that people have great difficulty learning relation-based categories with a probabilistic (i.e., family resemblance) structure. In Experiment 1, we investigated interventions hypothesized to facilitate learning family-resemblance relational categories. Changing the description of the task from learning about categories to choosing the “winning” object in each stimulus had the greatest impact on subjects’ ability to learn probabilistic relation-based categories. Experiment 2 tested two hypotheses about how the “who’s winning” task works. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that the task invokes a “winning” schema that encourages learners to discover a higher-order relation that remains invariant over members of a category. Experiment 3 reinforced and further clarified the nature of this effect. 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.
Graduation Semester
2012-12
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/42228
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2012 Wookyoung Jung

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