TEACHING BY EXAMPLES - IMPLICATIONS FOR THE PROCESS OF CATEGORY ACQUISITION

A new paradigm, the ''teaching-by-examples'' paradigm, was used to she d new light on the process of category acquisition. In four experiment s (n = 90, 90, 115, 117), manipulating the variables of category struc ture, status of non-target category, learning mode, and teaching mode, participants first learned a category and then taught it to someone e lse. High agreement between participants on the teaching sequences was found across conditions, and a typical sequence was identified for ea ch category structure. The typical participant-produced sequences star ted with several ideal positive cases, followed by an ideal negative c ase and then borderline cases. The efficiency of such sequences for te aching was tested in another experiment (n = 60), in which they were c ompared with sequences emphasizing category borders and sequences emph asizing each dimension separately. The typical participant-produced se quences induced the most efficient learning. It is proposed that the p attern of performance may provide a rich source of data for testing an d fine-tuning models of category acquisition.