Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We outline and test a Bayesian model of the effects of evidencesampling on property induction. Our model assumes thatpeople are sensitive to the effects of different sampling framesapplied to sampled evidence. Two studies tested the model bycomparing property generalization following exposure tosamples selected because they belong to the same taxonomiccategory or because they share a salient property. Both studiesfound that category-based sampling led to broadergeneralization than property-based sampling. In line withmodel predictions, these differences were attenuated when amixture of positive and negative evidence was presented(Experiment 1) and when category-property relations wereprobabilistic rather than deterministic (Experiment 2).