The Lab ca. May, 1997
Pictured
From left to right:
- Art Markman (standing)
- Trisha Lindemann and Jordan Witzel
- Shi Zhang
- Yung-Cheng Shen
- Takashi Yamauchi (bored)
- Tomislav Pavlicic (standing)
We need research participants who can come to the lab to participate in studies. If you are in the Austin, Texas area, and if you are interested in participating in a study in the lab and to help out in our research, please click here.
One of the core organizing frameworks of the lab is a search for ways to study cognitive processes that provide a good balance between the control that laboratory experiments allow and ecological validity. That is, whatever we study in the lab should bear some resemblance to what people do in their daily lives (when they are not participating in an experiment). We use this philosophy in our studies of comparison, decision making, and categorization.
Comparison is a central aspect of cognitive processing that affects abilities as simple as noticing that a pair of identical twins are in fact the same to our ability to notice that an atom is like the solar system, because something revolves around something else in each. The research we do on similarity and comparison reflects that the same process can account for both the mundane similarity comparisons and also the more complex analogical comparisons.
Of course, the study of similarity is primarily interesting, because we believe that the process of making comparisons operates in domains beyond similarity. Two areas that we have looked at in particular are Decision Making and Categorization.
The research on Decision Making focuses on the processes that people use to choose among a set of alternatives. One thing that people seem to do is to compare the alternatives they are choosing between. In these comparisons (as in similarity comparisons), corresponding pieces of information become important. For example, when choosing which of two colleges is best, people are more likely to pay attention to information about the academic reputation of the schools if they have information about the reputation of both schools than if they have that information about only one school. Thus, you could have some feature of a choice that you think is quite important, but you might not pay much attention to it if you don't have a corresponding piece of information for all of the options. We are also interested in the influence of people's goals on what they value. We are using the patterns of change in people's preferences for items when a goal is activated to better understand what people's goals are.
The research on Categorization is primarily focused on how the way people use categories affects what they learn about them. In some research, we have contrasted learning categories by learning to classify new items with learning categories by learning to predict features of new items. In other research, we have asked people to build LEGO models collaboratively in an effort to understand how communicating (in this case about LEGO pieces) affects the categories (of LEGO pieces) that are formed. We have also explored how people learn categories in the process of forming preferences about them.
We also study different types of categories. Most research examines how people learn which features are associated with a category or which features help to distinguish one category from another. We are also interested in the development of role-governed categories, which are categoiries that are defined by the role they play in some situation. For example, there is no particular set of properties that defines something as a game. Instead, games are the kinds of things that people play. Similarly, a barrier is not defined by a set of properties, but instead is marked by being the sort of thing that obstructs. We are developing methods to examine how role-governed categories are learned and how learning of role-governed categories differs from learning of categories associated with sets of features.
Finally, we explore the relationship between motivation and learning broadly. We are interested in whether people's orientation to potential gains and losses in the environment affect performance on a range of cognitive tasks. We find that when this orientation to gains or losses matches the actual rewards available in the environment, then people are more flexible in their performance than when there is a mismatch between their motivational orientation and the reward structure of the environment.
The Lab ca. May, 1997 |
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