T. Yamauchi, & A.B. Markman
Inference using categories.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and
Cognition. Vol. 26.pp. 776-795 (2000)
How do people use category membership and similarity for making inductive inferences? We addressed this question by examining the influence of category labels and category features on an inference and a classification task that were designed to be comparable. In the inference task, participants predicted the value of a missing feature of an item given its category label and other feature values. In the classification task, participants predicted the category label of an item given its feature values. The results from four experiments suggest that category membership influences inductive inference even when similarity information contradicts the category label. This tendency was stronger when the category label conveyed class-inclusion information than when the label reflected a feature of the category. These findings suggest that category labels are different from category features in that category labels inhibit inferences of feature values that go against what is typical for the category, and promote inferences of feature values that are typically associated with the category.