Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Four experiments explored the effect of diversity of contrasting negative evidence on inductive inferences drawnfrom a single-item target. In Experiments 1 and 2, we found that increasing the diversity of a contrast set led people to inferthat a target exemplar corresponded to a higher level category and led to greater generalization of a novel property associatedwith the target. Further, we demonstrated two boundary conditions in which the effect only occurred when the contrast setwas consistent with a higher level category that both united the contrast exemplars and distinguished them from the target(Experiment 4) and when contrast and target shared an obvious parent category (Experiment 5). Taken together, these findingsdemonstrate that increasing the diversity of a contrast increases generalization from a target, but only if the contrast set is drawnfrom a single category that excludes, but shares a common parent with, the target.