ABSTRACT
Two experiments and computational simulations investigated the way people make classifications and inferences when the information about category membership was available to participants. On a classification question, participants were asked to predict the category to which a stimulus belongs, and on an inference question, participants were asked to predict the feature value of a stimulus given the category membership of the stimulus. Given classification questions, participants ‘ performance was influenced greatly by the concrete appearance of individual stimuli, but such an influenced was not present in participants answering inference questions.
