Reconstructing the recent visual past: Hierarchical knowledge-based effects in visual working memory.

This paper presents two experiments that examine the influence of multiple levels of knowledge on visual working memory (VWM). Experiment 1 focused on memory for faces. Faces were selected from continua that were constructed by morphing two face photographs in 100 steps; half of the continua morphed a famous face into an unfamiliar one, while the other half used two unfamiliar faces.

Raising argument strength using negative evidence: a constraint on models of induction.

Both intuitively, and according to similarity-based theories of induction, relevant evidence raises argument strength when it is positive and lowers it when it is negative. In three experiments, we tested the hypothesis that argument strength can actually increase when negative evidence is introduced. Two kinds of argument were compared through forced choice or sequential evaluation: single positive arguments (e.

On domain differences in categorization and context variety.

Membership in many natural categories is considered all-or-none, while membership in most artifact categories is found to be graded. We introduce an alternative for the prevailing view that this domain difference in categorization results from representational differences. The context variety account posits that an item's gradedness reflects the variety of contexts it appears in.

Feature integration in natural language concepts.

Two experiments measured the joint influence of three key sets of semantic features on the frequency with which artifacts (Experiment 1) or plants and creatures (Experiment 2) were categorized in familiar categories. For artifacts, current function outweighed both originally intended function and current appearance. For biological kinds, appearance and behavior, an inner biological function, and appearance and behavior of offspring all had similarly strong effects on categorization.