Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A central issue in cognitive science is whether learning and processing constraints are particular to domains or whether they generalize across domains. In this paper the domain-generality of a particular type of constraint, linear separability, was examined. Prior research has found that decisions in the social domain are often consistent with linear separability but this is rarely true of decisions in the object domain. Two experiments were conducted to examine the generality of this result by using fiindamentally different types of social and object materials than have been used in previous research. In both experiments different integration strategies were observed in social and object domains, and as in prior research many more Summation sorts occurred with social materials. These results indicate that previous differences that have been observed between object and social domains generalize to very different types of object and social materials. At a general level the results indicate that the structure of knowledge varies with domain, and consequently it will be difficult to formulate domaingeneral constraints in terms of abstract structural properties such as linear separability.