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Probing the Mental Representation of Relation-Defined Categories

Du, Yuhui
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1597414024378882

Abstract Details

2020, Master of Arts, Ohio State University, Psychology.
The acquisition and mental representation of relational concepts have been found to be different from those of featural concepts. We report two behavioral experiments, in which participants learned to categorize fictional diseases from stimuli that encouraged relational comparisons. In Experiment 1 the categories were defined in terms of either stimulus features or relations, and also varied whether a relevant property (feature or relation) was deterministically or probabilistically related to category membership. We introduce a novel stimulus-reconstruction task to probe the category representation after the training was complete. Unlike featural concepts, we predict that relational concepts will be hard to learn in a family resemblance structure where no single relation is deterministic and reconstructed with more extreme values rather than prototypical values (extreme-value hypothesis). The results from Experiment 1 partially supported our predictions but also reflect that the featural conditions may have been treated as relational conditions in disguise. Therefore, we conducted Experiment 2 to solve the ambiguity of relational and featural strategies. The training phase in Experiment 2 was analogous to training phase of featural condition in Experiment 1 and the participants were free to adopt a relation-based or a feature-based categorization strategy. Experiment 2 introduced a new transfer phase that was designed to evaluate which participants used which strategies. The final, stimulus-reconstruction phase was the same as in Experiment 1 and reexamined the predictions of interest. The results of Experiment 2 provided additional support for the extreme-value hypothesis.
Alexander Petrov (Advisor)
Brandon Turner (Committee Member)
Vladimir Sloutsky (Committee Member)
John Hummel (Committee Member)
89 p.
Cognitive Psychology; Psychology

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Citations

  • Du, Y. (2020). Probing the Mental Representation of Relation-Defined Categories [Master's thesis, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1597414024378882

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Du, Yuhui. Probing the Mental Representation of Relation-Defined Categories. 2020. Ohio State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1597414024378882.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Du, Yuhui. "Probing the Mental Representation of Relation-Defined Categories." Master's thesis, Ohio State University, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1597414024378882

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1597414024378882
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.
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