The problem of how people process novel and unexpected information--"deep learning" (Ohlsson in "Deep learning: how the mind overrides experience." Cambridge University Press, New York, 2011)--is central to several fields of research, including creativity, belief revision, and conceptual change. Researchers have not converged…

Most questions in social and biomedical sciences are causal in nature: what would happen to individuals, or to groups, if part of their environment were changed? In this groundbreaking text, two world-renowned experts present statistical methods for studying such questions. This book starts with the notion of potential outcomes, each corresponding…

Introduction: Star and Bowker describe the residual as what does not fit into a category system and as an inevitable byproduct of classification. In this project, we explore what happens when we attempt to give prominence to the residual instead of minimizing it. Methods: The three authors created three "transformations" of a small…

Three experiments investigated responding consistent with transitive class containment, a feature of hierarchical classification. Experiment 1 replicated key components of a preliminary attempt to model hierarchical classification (Griffee & Dougher, 2002) and tested for responding consistent with transitive class containment. Only 2 out of 5…

This article presents what is possibly the first English translation of a 1930 manuscript related to Vygotsky's work (probably written by Vygotsky himself). This manuscript, the Zalkind Summary, is a five-point summary of his presentation to the First All-Union Congress on the Study of Human Behaviour in Leningrad in January 1930. This article…

The objective of this study was to identify the methodological approaches employed in a sample of Brazilian distance education scientific literature and compare with similar publications in the United States. Brazilian sample articles (N = 983) published in several journals and meetings were compared with a sample of articles published in…

Models of a psychological process can be difficult to discriminate experimentally because it is not easy to determine the values of the critical design variables (e.g., presentation schedule, stimulus structure) that will be most informative in differentiating them. Recent developments in sampling-based search methods in statistics make it…

Many of the problems studied in cognitive science are inductive problems, requiring people to evaluate hypotheses in the light of data. The key to solving these problems successfully is having the right inductive biases--assumptions about the world that make it possible to choose between hypotheses that are equally consistent with the observed…

Attempts to determine the extent that typicality effects obtained in previous research on natural semantic categories could be obtained in artificial categories purely as a function of structural principles when the frequency and nature of experience with items were controlled. (Author/RK)

The salience of encoding attributes in instances of differing levels of category membership was examined using the release from proactive interference (PI) task with college students. Results are discussed in terms of providing converging evidence for Rosch's (1973,1975) theory of semantic category structure. (Editor/RK)

Examined 7- and 9-month-olds' ability to categorize cats and dogs as separate from one another. Found that both groups formed a cat category that included novel cats but excluded a dog and an eagle, and formed a dog category that included novel dogs and a novel cat but excluded an eagle. Results mirrored those of 3- to 4-month-olds with visual…

Expanded version of a talk presented at the meeting of the Eastern Verbal Investigators League, Brandeis University, May 1, 1971. (VM)

Compared five distinct classes of models of how people judge the relative sizes of named objects. Four basic experiments were all concerned with the amount of time necessary to decide which of two named things is larger. (Editor/RK)

A survey of how 17 recent experimental psychology textbooks treated the subject of random assignment of subjects to groups for purposes of experimentation is discussed. Findings indicate that the textbooks generally gave favorable coverage to the practice. Further research might improve this simplistic understanding. (Author/DB)

This paper posits a taxonomy for categorizing issues that arise in the evaluation of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs). The taxonomy has three dimensions: Life Cycle of Evaluation, Research Issues, and Methodological Issues. The Life Cycle dimension has four levels: pre-experimental, laboratory study, field study, and initial operational test…