Revisiting Wittgenstein's puzzle: hierarchical encoding and comparison facilitate learning of probabilistic relational categories.

ABSTRACT: Kittur et al. (2004, 2006) and Jung and Hummel (2011, 2014) showed that people have great difficulty learning relation-based categories with a probabilistic (i.e., family resemblance) structure, in which no single relation is shared by all members of a category. Yet acquisition of such categories is not strictly impossible: in all these studies, roughly half the participants eventually learned to criterion. What are these participants doing that the other half are not? We hypothesized that successful participants were those who divided the nominal categories into two or more sub-categories, each of which individually had a deterministic structure. We report three experiments testing this hypothesis: explicitly presenting participants with hierarchical (category and sub-category) structures

SUBMITTER: Jung W 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4322609 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature