Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this study, we focused on the Generic Overgeneralisation(GOG) effect (Leslie, Khemlani, and Glucksberg 2011) andtested the relevance of context and an explanation based onquantifier domain restriction for the pattern of judgement dataobserved. Participants judged generic majority characteristicstatements like tigers have stripes or statements withuniversal quantifiers that have different sensitivity to context(‘all’, ‘all the’, ‘each’) preceded by one of three levels ofcontext: a) neutral, where the information in the context doesnot interact with the truth value of the critical statement, b)contradictory, where it presents an exception which shouldrule out a universally quantified statement, and c) supportive.Our results suggest that proponents of the generics-as-defaultview ruled out context prematurely and that in fact context isa viable alternative explanation for much of the so-calledGOG effect.