Abstract coherent categories

Many studies have demonstrated the importance of the knowledge that interre lates features in people's mental representation of categories and that mak es our conception of categories coherent. This article focuses on abstract coherent categories, coherent categories that are also abstract because the y are defined by relations independently of any features. Four experiments demonstrate that abstract coherent categories are learned more easily than control categories with identical features and statistical structure, and a lso that participants induced an abstract representation of the category by granting category membership to exemplars with completely novel features. The authors argue that the human conceptual system is heavily populated wit h abstract coherent concepts, including conceptions of social groups, socie tal institutions, legal, political, and military scenarios, and many supero rdinate categories, such as classes of natural kinds.