| Abstract: | The concept-identification (CI) literature supports a hypothesis-sampling theory. Hypotheses based on attributes, sample sizes greater than one, and nonreplacement of eliminated hypotheses all occur. An experimental procedure was developed to measure hypothesis-sampling directly where the subject is allowed to select attributes that he wishes to see, then randomly selected values on the selected attributes are presented.Generally, the average sample size before the trial of the last error (TLE) does not change but does change after TLE. The probabilities of eliminating inconsistent hypotheses and keeping consistent hypotheses increase over problems. The proportion of eliminated attributes which are resampled decreases over problems. Individual subjects are extremely varied in sample size, efficiency measures, and resampling tendencies. The rate of solution, TLE, is related to the efficiency and resampling measures but not to the sample size. |
