This article reviews the origins and use of the terms quasi-experiment and natural experiment. It demonstrates how the terms conflate whether variation in the independent variable of interest falls short of random with whether researchers find, rather than intervene to create, that variation. Using the lens of assignment--the process driving…

Background: Prior research suggests that the teaching of abstract concepts can be enhanced by the use of concrete examples, but there are few controlled studies. Objective: To replicate key findings from experiment one from Rawson et al. (2015). Method: Experiment participants studied definitions of abstract concepts from psychology, either with…

The curse of dimensionality, which has been widely studied in statistics and machine learning, occurs when additional features cause the size of the feature space to grow so quickly that learning classification rules becomes increasingly difficult. How do people overcome the curse of dimensionality when acquiring real-world categories that have…

A fundamental goal in the study of human cognition is to understand the transfer of knowledge. This goes hand-in-hand with the translational goal of promoting such transfer via instructional techniques. Despite a rich history of research using the analogical problem-solving paradigm, no study activity has been found to produce a robust rate of…

Learning naturalistic categories, which tend to have fuzzy boundaries and vary on many dimensions, can often be harder than learning well defined categories. One method for facilitating the category learning of naturalistic stimuli may be to provide explicit feature descriptions that highlight the characteristic features of each category. Although…

Categorical perception (CP) effects manifest as faster or more accurate discrimination between objects that come from different categories compared with objects that come from the same category, controlling for the physical differences between the objects. The most popular explanations of CP effects have relied on perceptual warping causing…

Psychologists and educators have long pointed to myriad benefits of self-directed learning. Yet evidence of its efficacy in real-world domains is mixed and it remains unclear how it is constrained by basic perceptual and cognitive processes. Previous work suggests that, in particular, self-directed learning is affected by the way that people…

This article assesses how people reason with categories whose features are related in causal cycles. Whereas models based on causal graphical models (CGMs) have enjoyed success modeling category-based judgments as well as a number of other cognitive phenomena, CGMs are only able to represent causal structures that are acyclic. A number of new…

Six experiments investigated variables predicted to influence subjects' tendency to classify items by a single property ("rule-based" responding) instead of overall similarity, following the paradigm of Norenzayan et al. (2002, "Cognitive Science"), who found that European Americans tended to give more "logical"…

Stimuli that capture the central tendency of presented exemplars are often preferred--a phenomenon also known as the classic beauty-in-averageness effect. However, recent studies have shown that this effect can reverse under certain conditions. We propose that a key variable for such ugliness-in-averageness effects is the category structure of the…

Adolescents with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD) performed two priming experiments in which they implicitly processed a prime stimulus, containing high and/or low spatial frequency information, and then explicitly categorized a target face either as male/female (gender task) or as positive/negative (Valence task). Adolescents with ASD…

In short-term-memory (STM)-search tasks, observers judge whether a test probe was present in a short list of study items. Here we investigated the long-term learning mechanisms that lead to the highly efficient STM-search performance observed under conditions of consistent-mapping (CM) training, in which targets and foils never switch roles across…

Linguistic and non-linguistic pattern learning have been studied separately, but we argue for a comparative approach. Analogous inductive problems arise in phonological and visual pattern learning. Evidence from three experiments shows that human learners can solve them in analogous ways, and that human performance in both cases can be captured by…

Feedback is highly contingent on behavior if it eventually becomes easy to predict, and weakly contingent on behavior if it remains difficult or impossible to predict even after learning is complete. Many studies have demonstrated that humans and nonhuman animals are highly sensitive to feedback contingency, but no known studies have examined how…

Three experiments were designed to test whether experimentally created ad hoc associative networks evoke false memories. We used the DRM (Deese, Roediger, McDermott) paradigm with lists of ad hoc categories composed of exemplars aggregated toward specific goals (e.g., going for a picnic) that do not share any consistent set of features. Experiment…