A Formal Psychological Model of Classification Applied to Natural-Science Category Learning

The field of psychological science has seen major advances in the development of formal models of perceptual classification learning; however, little work has tested such models in real-world natural-category domains. In our current project, we aim to fill that gap by testing the ability of a formal exemplar model of classification to predict learning of rock categories in the geologic sciences. As a prerequisite for testing the model in this domain, we have conducted extensive work to derive a high-dimensional feature-space representation for the rock stimuli. An eight-dimensional representation yields good accounts of naive participants' judgments of similarity among a large battery of rock-picture samples; furthermore, the eight dimensions have natural psychological interpretations. We then use the exemplar model in combination with the derived feature-space representation to successfully predict participants' learning and generalization of a variety of scientifically defined rock categories. We discuss further steps for making use of the model and its associated feature-space representation to search for effective techniques of teaching categories in the science classroom.