Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The effect of knowledge about causal relationships between category attributes on categorization decisions was investigated. Participants were taught that category attributes were causally related in either a common-cause or a common-effect causal pattern. The weight given to attributes during subsequent categorization depended on the causal pattern: In the common-cause condition the common cause was weighted most heavily, whereas in the common-effect condition the common-effect was weighted most heavily. Participants also attended to correlations between causally related features, generating lower categorization ratings if a cause-effect relationship was violated. Participants displayed a wide variety of different strategies in making categorization decisions, including ones that employed higher-order configural information involving more than two attributes. There was no effect of the "kmd" of the category (biological kind, nonliving natural kind, or artifact) on categorization decisions, and kind of category did not interact with causal pattern.