Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A two-stage model is applied to category construction. The first stage of the model involves looking for a defining feature among exemplars and creating initial categories based on the defining features. In the second stage, overall similarity is calculated to categorize the remaining exemplars that were not classified by the defining feature. For some types of exemplar structures, family resemblance sorting emerges as a product of the two-stage model. A series of experiments was carried out to contrast the two-stage model with Anderson's induction model (Anderson, 1988)and CLUSTER/2 (Michalski & Stepp, 1983). The results showed that the two-stage model is abetter predictor of when family resemblance sorting will or will not occur.