Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study is designed to investigate the predictions of a connectionist model of the development of inductive inference (Loose & Mareschal, 1997). We demonstrate that adults sometimes use perceptual as opposed to label information when reasoning about a taxonomically structured domain (biological kinds). Thirty six participants were taught the names of a set of tropical seeds. Participants believed that they were learning about real seeds, however the stimuli were constructed after the predictions of the model. Participants were taught that one seed had a particular non-perceptual property, and that a second did not. The task was to infer whether a third seed would have this property. In some cases, the third seed was given the appearance of one seed type, but the name of another. The results supported the model's prediction that participants would make perceptually based inferences in this condition (N = 32, /=2.18, p<0.05). These results stand in contrast to previous work using this experimental paradigm (e.g. Gelman & Markman, 1986). The results challenge previous interpretations of inference behavior to recognize that the use of perceptual information as a guide depends in part on the perceptual structure of the category in question, and is not simply explained by an appeal to conceptual representation in terms of causal "theory" structures.