Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The extent to which we generalize a novel property from asample of familiar instances to novel instances depends on thesample used. In these experiments, we are interested in twosample characteristics: number of types (discrete entities) andnumber of tokens (copies of the same entity) that share a novelproperty. Existing studies permit separate and conditionalhypotheses about the effects of adding types and tokens, but nostudy has examined the effects of both variables ongeneralization stimuli varying in similarity. We find thatadding types broadens generalization to similar stimuli, buttightens generalization to dissimilar stimuli. Adding tokensdoes not affect generalization, but adding repetitions that areframed as types produces some tightening. Implications formodels of inductive reasoning are discussed.