Inference using categories

How do people use category membership and similarity for making inductive i nferences? The authors addressed this question by examining the impact of c ategory labels and category features on inference and classification tasks that were designed to be comparable. In the inference task, participants pr edicted the value of a missing feature of an item given its category label and other feature values. In the classification task, participants predicte d the category label of an item given its feature values. The results from 4 experiments suggest that category membership influences inference even wh en similarity information contradicts the category label. This tendency was stronger when the category label conveyed class inclusion information than when the label reflected a feature of the category. These findings suggest that category membership affects inference beyond similarity and that cate gory labels and category features are 2 different things.