Information about the logical structure of a category affects generalization

This paper considers whether information about the logical structure of a category affects how people generalize. We carried out three experiments with the following structure: participants were first presented with a set of training items, and were subsequently asked to decide whether new items belonged to the same category as the training items. Each experiment had two conditions that differed only in terms of the category label provided for the training items; different category labels conveyed different information about the logical structure of the category to which the training items were supposed to belong. In all cases, participants' generalization was greatly affected by such information. Our results suggest that people make the default assumption that category labels correspond to groupings of highly similar objects.