CATEGORY-BASED PREDICTIONS - INFLUENCE OF UNCERTAINTY AND FEATURE ASSOCIATIONS

Four experiments examined how people make inductive inferences using c ategories. Subjects read stories in which 2 categories were mentioned as possible identities of an object. The less likely category was vari ed to determine if people were using it, as well as the most likely ca tegory, in making predictions about the object. Experiment 1 showed th at even when categorization uncertainty was emphasized, subjects used only 1 category as the basis for their prediction. Experiments 2-4 exa mined whether people would use multiple categories for making predicti ons when the feature to be predicted was associated to the less likely category. Multiple categories were used in this case, but only in lim ited circumstances; furthermore, using multiple categories in 1 predic tion did not cause subjects to use them for subsequent predictions. Th e results increase the understanding of how categories are used in ind uctive inference.