Soccer science and the Bayes community: exploring the cognitive implications of modern scientific communication.

Science is a form of distributed analysis involving both individual work that produces new knowledge and collaborative work to exchange information with the larger community. There are many particular ways in which individual and community can interact in science, and it is difficult to assess how efficient these are, and what the best way might be to support them. This paper reports on a series of experiments in this area and a prototype implementation using a research platform called CACHE.

Consistent contrast and correlation in free sorting.

Two experiments investigated free sorting, a type of unsupervised learning, with multiattribute drawings of alien animals. In previous research on concept formation, with simpler stimulus structure than ours, participants were insensitive to correlational structure in the stimuli, producing primarily "ID sorts," based on the values ofjust 1 dimension or attribute. Our experiments showed that participants used many strategies in categorizing but preferred to generate groupings that reflected the correlations in input when this did not violate consistent contrast.

Unsupervised concept learning and value systematicity: a complex whole aids learning the parts.

Ease of learning new concepts may best be understood by simultaneously considering models of learning and theories of how "good" systems of categories are organized. The authors tested the effects on learning of value systematicity, a proposed organizing principle: If 1 attribute is predictive of another, it should predict still more. This principle derives from focused sampling in the internal feedback model (D.