| Abstract: | Four experiments investigated how people judge both the typicality and membership of items in conjunctive concepts such as school furniture or sports which are games. Judgments of membership in conjunctions were overextended, and there was asymmetry between the constituent concepts in their influence on relative conjunctive concept membership. The results are discussed in the light of recent theoretical disputes about the modeling of concept representations and the process of forming conjunctions (Cohen & Murphy, 1984; Osherson & Smith, 1981, 1982; Smith & Osherson, 1984). A theory is proposed in which constituent intensions are combined to form a composite prototype for the conjunction. Membership in both single and conjunctive concepts is then determined in the same unitary fashion, by placing a membership criterion on the perceived similarity of possible exemplars to the prototype. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
