Category and feature identification

Abstract

This paper considers a family of inductive problems where reasoners must identify familiar categories or features on the basis of limited information. Problems of this kind are encountered, for example, when word learners acquire novel labels for pre-existing concepts. We develop a probabilistic model of identification and evaluate it in three experiments. Our first two experiments explore problems where a single category or feature must be identified, and our third experiment explores cases where participants must combine several pieces of information in order to simultaneously identify a category and a feature. Humans readily solve all of these problems, and we show that our model accounts for human inferences better than several alternative approaches.