title: Induction with uncertain categories: When do people consider the category alternatives?
abstract: These three experiments examined how people make property inferences about exemplars whose category membership is uncertain. Participants were shown two categories and a novel exemplar with a feature that indicated that the exemplar was more likely to belong to one category (target) than to the other (nontarget). Participants then made categorization decisions and property inferences about the novel exemplar. In some conditions, property inferences could be made only by considering both target and nontarget categories. In other conditions, predictions could be based on both categories or on the target category alone. Consistent with previous studies (e.g., Murphy & Ross, 1994, 2005), we found that many people made predictions based only on consideration of the target category. However, the prevalence of such single-category reasoning was greatly reduced by highlighting the costs of neglecting nontarget alternatives and by asking for inferences before categorization decisions. The results suggest that previous work may have exaggerated the prevalence of single-category reasoning and that people may be more flexible in their use of multiple categories in property inference than has been previously recognized.
authors.affiliation: University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. b.hayes@unsw.edu.au
authors.forename: Brett K
authors.initials: BK
authors.lastname: Hayes
authors.forename: Ben R
authors.initials: BR
authors.lastname: Newell
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001245:Association Learning; D002965:Classification / Q000379:methods*; D003657:Decision Making; D003937:Diagnosis, Differential; D005260:Female; D005793:Generalization, Psychological; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011337:Probability Learning; D035501:Uncertainty
references.citation: Cogn Psychol. 1999 Jun;38(4):495-553
references.pmid: 10334879
references.citation: J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 1996 May;22(3):736-53
references.pmid: 8656154
references.citation: Mem Cognit. 2003 Jul;31(5):790-9
references.pmid: 12956243
references.citation: J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 1995 May;21(3):646-61
references.pmid: 7602266
references.citation: Psychol Sci. 2005 Nov;16(11):852-5
references.pmid: 16262768
references.citation: J Pers Soc Psychol. 1984 Dec;47(6):1231-43
references.pmid: 6527215
references.citation: Cogn Psychol. 1994 Oct;27(2):148-93
references.pmid: 7956106
references.citation: Cognition. 2005 Mar;95(2):175-200
references.pmid: 15694645
references.citation: Harv Bus Rev. 2003 Jul;81(7):56-63, 117
references.pmid: 12858711
references.citation: Science. 1981 Jan 30;211(4481):453-8
references.pmid: 7455683
references.citation: Cognition. 2003 Sep;89(2):157-78
references.pmid: 12915299
references.citation: J Exp Psychol Gen. 1988 Sep;117(3):227-47
references.pmid: 2971760