Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How do people learn categories of simple, transitive events? W e claim that people attempt to recover from input the predictive structure that is the basis of 'good', inferentially rich categories. Prior work with object categories found facilitation in teaming a component relation (e.g. feathers covary with beak) when that correlation was embedded in a system of other, mutually relevant correlations. Little research has investigated event categories, but researchers have suggested that verb meanings (hence perhaps event categories) might be organized quite differently from noun meanings (and object categories). Thus it is far from clear whether the learning biases or procedures found for object categories will also appear for event learning. T w o experiments investigated the effects of systematic correlational structure on learning the regularities axnprising a set of event categories. Both found the same pattern of facilitation from correlational coherence as found earlier with object categories. W e briefly discuss relations to 1) other constraints on concept learning that focus on the organization of the whole system of concepts and 2) learning paradigms that produce competition, not facilitation, between corrdated cues.