THE LOCUS OF KNOWLEDGE EFFECTS IN CONCEPT-LEARNING

Three experiments investigated how knowledge influences concept format ion and representation in a standard concept acquisition task. The pri mary comparison was among arbitrary concepts, which had meaningless fe atures; meaningful concepts, which had meaningful features from differ ent domains; and integrated concepts, which had meaningful features in terconnected by common knowledge. Experiment 1 found that learning was superior for the integrated concepts but that there was little differ ence as a function of feature meaningfulness. Experiment 2 suggested t hat the integrated Ss were learning to form a knowledge-based schema a s their concept representation because they did not distinguish the ty picality of features that differed in frequency. Experiment 3 introduc ed a category whose features were from the same domain but were not ot herwise related. This concept was as difficult to learn and use as the meaningful concepts were. These comparisons help specify the ways in which knowledge does and does not influence concept formation.