Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The elimination model is proposed as an account of the inverse base-rate effect (D. L. Medin & S. M. Edelson, 1988). A key-assumption is that participants sometimes rely on eliminative inference to decide among candidate categories. A new prediction is that there will be an inverse base-rate effect also for an entirely novel symptom presented in the transfer phase—a prediction that contrasts with that by ADIT (J. K. Kruschke, 1996). This was tested and confirmed in 2 experiments.