Title
Feature centrality and property induction
Abstract
A feature is central to a concept to the extent that other features depend on it. Four studies tested the hypothesis that people will project a feature from a base concept to a target concept to the extent that they believe the feature is central to the two concepts. This centrality hypothesis implies that feature projection is guided by a principle that aims to maximize the structural commonality between base and target concepts. Participants were told that a category has two or three novel features. One feature was the most central in that more properties depended on it. The extent to which the target shared the feature’s dependencies was manipulated by varying the similarity of category pairs. Participants’ ratings of the likelihood that each feature would hold in the target category support the centrality hypothesis with both natural kind and artifact categories and with both well-specified and vague dependency structures.
Year
DOI
Venue
2004
10.1016/j.cogsci.2003.09.001
Cognitive Science
Keywords
Field
DocType
Induction,Categorical inference,Conceptual centrality,Projectibility
Categorization,Logical reasoning,Natural kind,Inference,Concept learning,Cognitive psychology,Centrality,Psychology,Cognition
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
28
1
0364-0213
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
2
0.86
5
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Constantinos Hadjichristidis120.86
Steven Sloman220.86
Rosemary J. Stevenson312410.36
David Over4114.13