Is Concept Appraisal Modulated by Procedural or Declarative Manipulations?

A recent study has established that thinkers reliably engage in epistemic appraisals of concepts of natural categories. Here, five studies are reported which investigated the effects of different manipulations of category learning context on appraisal of the concepts learnt. It was predicted that dimensions of concept appraisal could be affected by manipulating either procedural factors (spacing of learning, perceptual fluency) or declarative factors (causal knowledge about categories).

Context effects in similarity judgments.

Tversky's (1977) famous demonstration of a diagnosticity effect indicates that the similarity between the same two stimuli depends on the presence of contextual stimuli. In a forced choice task, the similarity between a target and a choice, appears to depend on the other choices. Specifically, introducing a distractor grouped with one of the options would reduce preference for the grouped option.

Concept Appraisal.

This paper reports the first empirical investigation of the hypothesis that epistemic appraisals form part of the structure of concepts. To date, studies of concepts have focused on the way concepts encode properties of objects and the way those features are used in categorization and in other cognitive tasks. Philosophical considerations show the importance of also considering how a thinker assesses the epistemic value of beliefs and other cognitive resources and, in particular, concepts.

What Makes Some Diseases More Typical than Others? A Survey on the Impact of Disease Characteristics and Professional Background on Disease Typicality.

Health professionals tend to perceive some diseases as more typical than others. If disease typicalities have implications for health professionals or health policy makers' handling of different diseases, then it is of great social, epistemic, and ethical interest. Accordingly, it is important to find out what makes health professionals rank diseases as more or less typical.

Declarative Memory and Structural Language Impairment in Autistic Children and Adolescents.

Two experiments tested the hypothesis that a plausible contributory factor of structural language impairment in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is impaired declarative memory. We hypothesized that familiarity and recollection (subserving semantic and episodic memory, respectively) are both impaired in autistic individuals with clinically significant language impairment and learning disability (ASD ); whereas recollection is selectively impaired in autistic individuals with typical language (ASD ). Teenagers with ASD (n = 19) and primary school age children with ASD (n = 26) were compared with teenagers with learning disability (LD) (n = 26) without autism, and primary school aged typically developing (TD) children (n = 32).

Using the validated Reflective Functioning Questionnaire to investigate mentalizing in individuals presenting with eating disorders with and without self-harm.

Background: The present study builds on previous research which explored the relationship between mentalizing and eating disorders (ED) in a subgroup of patients with comorbid self-harm (SH). Whereas previous literature had linked this comorbidity to impulse-control difficulties, more recent advances have suggested that a lack of a mentalizing stance might be responsible for a more treatment-resistant and severe symptomatology in this subgroup of clients.

Methods: A cross-sectional, quasi-experimental, questionnaire-based, between-groups design was employed and a measure of mentalizing was compared in individuals presenting with ED only, individuals presenting with ED and concurrent SH and a control group.

Relationship between extensions and intensions in categorization: A match made in heaven?

The present study investigated the relationship between category extension and intension for 11 different semantic categories. It is often tacitly assumed that there is a (strong) extension-intension link. However, a recent study by Hampton and Passanisi (2016) examining the patterns of stable individual differences in concepts across participants called this hypothesis into question.

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.

The triangle inequality constraint in similarity judgments.

Since Tversky's (1977) seminal investigation, the triangle inequality, along with symmetry and minimality, have had a central role in investigations of the fundamental constraints on human similarity judgments. The meaning of minimality and symmetry in similarity judgments has been straightforward, but this is not the case for the triangle inequality. Expressed in terms of dissimilarities, and assuming a simple, linear function between dissimilarities and distances, the triangle inequality constraint implies that human behaviour should be consistent with Dissimilarity (A,B) + Dissimilarity (B,C) ≥ Dissimilarity (A,C), where A, B, and C are any three stimuli.

When intensions do not map onto extensions: Individual differences in conceptualization.

Concepts are represented in the mind through knowledge of their extensions (the class of items to which the concept applies) and intensions (features that distinguish that class of items). A common assumption among theories of concepts is that the 2 aspects are intimately related. Hence if there is systematic individual variation in concept representation, the variation should correlate between extensional and intensional measures.

The inherence heuristic is inherent in humans.

The inherence heuristic is too broad as a theoretical notion. The authors are at risk of applying their own heuristic in supporting itself. Nonetheless the article provides useful insight into the ways in which people overestimate the coherence and completeness of their understanding of the world.

Children with autism do not show sequence effects with auditory stimuli.

Categorization decisions that reflect constantly changing memory representations might be an important adaptive response to dynamic environments. We assessed One such influence from memory (i.e.

Conceptual combination: extension and intension. Commentary on Aerts, Gabora, and Sozzo.

Aerts et al. provide a valuable model to capture the interactive nature of conceptual combination in conjunctions and disjunctions. The commentary provides a brief review of the interpretation of these interactions that has been offered in the literature, and argues for a closer link between the more traditional account in terms of concept intensions, and the parameters that emerge from the fitting of the Quantum Probability model.

Quantum probability and conceptual combination in conjunctions.

I consider the general problem of category conjunctions in the light of Pothos & Busemeyer (P&B)'s quantum probability (QP) account of the conjunction fallacy. I argue that their account as presented cannot capture the "guppy effect" - the case in which a class is a better member of a conjunction A^B than it is of either A or B alone.

Semantic Memory Redux: An Experimental Test of Hierarchical Category Representation.

Four experiments investigated the classic issue in semantic memory of whether people organize categorical information in hierarchies and use inference to retrieve information from them, as proposed by Collins & Quillian (1969). Past evidence has focused on RT to confirm sentences such as "All birds are animals" or "Canaries breathe." However, confounding variables such as familiarity and associations between the terms have led to contradictory results.

The curious case of the refrigerator-TV: similarity and hybridization.

This article examines the role of similarity in the hybridization of concepts, focusing on hybrid products as an applied test case. Hybrid concepts found in natural language, such as singer songwriter, typically combine similar concepts, whereas dissimilar concepts rarely form hybrids. The hybridization of dissimilar concepts in products such as jogging shoe mp3 player and refrigerator TV thus poses a challenge for understanding the process of conceptual combination.

The Rumsfeld effect: the unknown unknown.

A set of studies tested whether people can use awareness of ignorance to provide enhanced test consistency over time if they are allowed to place uncertain items into a "don't know" category. For factual knowledge this did occur, but for a range of other forms of knowledge relating to conceptual knowledge and personal identity, no such effect was seen. Known unknowns would appear to be largely restricted to factual kinds of knowledge.

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.

The effect of relationship status on communicating emotions through touch.

Research into emotional communication to date has largely focused on facial and vocal expressions. In contrast, recent studies by Hertenstein, Keltner, App, Bulleit, and Jaskolka (2006) and Hertenstein, Holmes, McCullough, and Keltner (2009) exploring nonverbal communication of emotion discovered that people could identify anger, disgust, fear, gratitude, happiness, love, sadness and sympathy from the experience of being touched on either the arm or body by a stranger, without seeing the touch. The study showed that strangers were unable to communicate the self-focused emotions embarrassment, envy and pride, or the universal emotion surprise.

A probabilistic threshold model: analyzing semantic categorization data with the Rasch model.

According to the Threshold Theory (Hampton, 1995, 2007) semantic categorization decisions come about through the placement of a threshold criterion along a dimension that represents items' similarity to the category representation. The adequacy of this theory is assessed by applying a formalization of the theory, known as the Rasch model (Rasch, 1960; Thissen & Steinberg, 1986), to categorization data for eight natural language categories and subjecting it to a formal test. In validating the model special care is given to its ability to account for inter- and intra-individual differences in categorization and their relationship with item typicality.

Concept talk cannot be avoided.

Distinct systems for representing concepts as prototypes, exemplars, and theories are closely integrated in the mind, and the notion of concept is required as a framework for exploring this integration. Eliminating the term "concept" from our theories will hinder rather than promote scientific progress.

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.

When prototypes are not best: judgments made by children with autism.

The current study used a factorial comparison experimental design to investigate conflicting findings on prototype effects shown by children with autism (Klinger and Dawson, Dev Psychopathol 13:111-124, 2001; Molesworth et al., J Child Psychol Psychiatry 46:661-672, 2005). The aim was to see whether children with high-functioning autism could demonstrate prototype effects via categorization responses and whether failure to do so was related to difficulty understanding ambiguous task demands.