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Category: Project

Description: In previous work, Xu and Tenenbaum (2007a) provide evidence that learners are able to infer the subordinate meaning of a word from only positive examples of the category. Under their proposal, learners assume that examples are sampled from the true underlying category ("strong sampling''), making certain data patterns more consistent with a subordinate meaning than others (the "suspicious coincidence'' effect). More recent work (Spencer, Perone, Smith & Samuelson, 2011) questions the relevance of this finding by arguing that the effect only occurs when the examples are presented to the learner simultaneously. Across a series of 12 studies, we systematically manipulate several experimental parameters that vary between the previous studies, and successfully replicate the findings of both sets of authors. Taken together, our data suggest that the suspicious coincidence effect in fact is robust to presentation timing of examples, but is sensitive to a confound in previous experiments, namely, trial order.