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B Rehder

Publications and source records attributed to B Rehder.

4 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2001

Causal knowledge and categories: the effects of causal beliefs on categorization, induction, and similarity.

Despite the recent interest in the theoretical knowledge embedded in human representations of categories, little research has systematically manipulated the structure of such knowledge. Across four experiments this study assessed the effects of interattribute causal laws on a number of category-based judgments. The authors found that (a) any attribute occupying a central position in a network of causal relationships comes to dominate category membership, (b) combinations of attribute values are important to category membership to the extent they jointly confirm or violate the causal laws, and (c) the presence of causal knowledge affects the induction of new properties to the category. These effects were a result of the causal laws, rather than the empirical correlations produced by those laws. Implications for the doctrine of psychological essentialism, similarity-based models of categorization, and the representation of causal knowledge are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed2001

Abstract coherent categories.

Many studies have demonstrated the importance of the knowledge that interrelates features in people's mental representation of categories and that makes our conception of categories coherent. This article focuses on abstract coherent categories, coherent categories that are also abstract because they are defined by relations independently of any features. Four experiments demonstrate that abstract coherent categories are learned more easily than control categories with identical features and statistical structure, and also that participants induced an abstract representation of the category by granting category membership to exemplars with completely novel features. The authors argue that the human conceptual system is heavily populated with abstract coherent concepts, including conceptions of social groups, societal institutions, legal, political, and military scenarios, and many superordinate categories, such as classes of natural kinds.

Adult↗
PubMed2001

Interference between cognitive skills.

This study used a novel task, clock arithmetic, and a classic A-B/A-Br transfer design to investigate the presence of interference between cognitive skills. The A-B/A-Br design required participants to first learn problem-to-answer associations during training and then to learn new pairings between the same problems and answers during transfer. The associations learned during training interfered with those learned during transfer, as measured by slowed reaction times to emit the correct response, failures to retrieve any response, and intrusion errors. Interference persisted even after a 1-week retention interval and was especially prevalent during the warm-up period at the beginning of the retention test. The use of the A-B/A-Br design indicates that whether an incorrect answer retrieved from memory is emitted as a response depends on whether the intrusion is recognized as inappropriate for the current task. The long-term memory for cognitive skills means that attempts to learn new responses to old stimuli will be plagued by persistent intrusion errors.

Adult↗