Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A growing body of literature suggests that making differentsampling assumptions about how data are generated can leadto qualitatively different patterns of inference based on thatdata. However, relatively little is known about how samplingassumptions are represented or when they are incorporated.We report the results of a single category generalisation exper-iment aimed at exploring these issues. By systematically vary-ing both the sampling cover story and whether it is given beforeor after the training stimuli we are able to determine whetherencoding or retrieval issues drive the impact of sampling as-sumptions. We find that the sampling cover story affects gen-eralisation when it is presented before the training stimuli, butnot after, which we interpret in favour of an encoding account.