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The Similarity and Cognition Lab, run by Art Markman does research on how people see things to be similar to each other and how the way that we can compare things affects other aspects of cognition.
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.
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.
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. We have also explored how people learn categories in the process of forming preferences about them. .
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