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The Limitations and Extent of Category Generalization Within a Partially Learned Hierarchical Structure

abstract: Most people are experts in some area of information; however, they may not be knowledgeable about other closely related areas. How knowledge is generalized to hierarchically related categories was explored. Past work has found little to no generalization to categories closely related to learned categories. These results do not fit well with other work focusing on attention during and after category learning. The current work attempted to merge these two areas of by creating a category structure with the best chance to detect generalization. Participants learned order level bird categories and family level wading bird categories. Then participants completed multiple measures to test generalization to old wading bird categories, new wading bird categories, owl and raptor categories, and lizard categories. As expected, the generalization measures converged on a single overall pattern of generalization. No generalization was found, except for already learned categories. This pattern fits well with past work on generalization within a hierarchy, but do not fit well with theories of dimensional attention. Reasons why these findings do not match are discussed, as well as directions for future research. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Psychology 2013

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:asu.edu/item:18728
Date January 2013
ContributorsLancaster, Matthew E. (Author), Homa, Donald (Advisor), Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member), Chi, Michelene (Committee member), Brewer, Gene (Committee member), Arizona State University (Publisher)
Source SetsArizona State University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeDoctoral Dissertation
Format92 pages
Rightshttp://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/, All Rights Reserved

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