ABSTRACT
The finding that conjunctive concepts are easier for human subjects to learn than disjunctive concepts is reported in most introductory books on cognitive psychology. In this paper, we report some conditions under which this finding may not be true. In particular, we demonstrate that the prior causal knowledge of subjects can influence the rate of concept learning. We report on an experiment that indicates that disjunctive concepts which are consistent with prior knowledge take fewer trials to learn than conjunctive concepts which are not consistent with prior knowledge. We present a computer model of this learning task.
