Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We apply Bayesian data analysis to a structured cognitivemodel in order to determine the priors that support humangeneralizations in a simple concept learning task. We mod-eled 250,000 ratings in a “number game” experiment wheresubjects took examples of a numbers produced by a program(e.g. 4, 16, 32) and rated how likely other numbers (e.g. 8vs. 9) would be to be generated. This paper develops a dataanalysis technique for a family of compositional “Language ofThought” (LOT) models which permits discovery of subjects’prior probability of mental operations (e.g. addition, multi-plication, etc.) in this domain. Our results reveal high cor-relations between model mean predictions and subject gener-alizations, but with some qualitative mismatch for a stronglycompositional prior.