The Dissociation Between Specific And General Conclusions During Category-based Induction

Two experimental researches were performed for exploring the differences between specific conclusion category-based induction and general conclusion category-based induction in present study. The first research was applied to finding the main factor including typicality and similarity on inclusion fallacy effect of category-based induction to reveal subjects’ behavioral differences by comparing induction-strength of specific conclusion category-based induction with that of general conclusion category-based induction. Here, we designed two experiments, in which semantic verbal category-based induction was adopted in experiments.(e.g., rose B1→ lotus B1,rose B1 is premise which means we were told that rose has property B1,based on this premise, subjects has to judge whether the lotus also has property B1),and experiments included two types of semantic verbal category-based induction,specific conclusion category-based induction, and general-conclusion category-based induction. Their premises in the first experiment were composed of typical categories and blank properties that consist of alphabet plus Arabic number, conclusions in the first experiment were also composed of typical categories and blank properties in specific conclusion category-based induction, but conclusions were composed of lowest upper level categories and blank properties in general conclusion category-based induction. Besides, the similarity between premise category and conclusion was manipulated, when the similarity between them in specific conclusion is significant higher than that between them in general conclusion, which is classified into high similarity group, when the situation is on the contrary, that would beclassified into low similarity group. The second experiment was similar to the first experiment, only the conclusions in specific conclusion category-based induction were composed of atypical categories. In these two experiments, half subjects were asked to choose one of inductions by comparing induction-strength between specific conclusion and general conclusion induction, which is called forced choice task, half subjects were asked to estimate induction-strength of inductions with 6-points scale, which is called scale estimation task. The results of two experiments showed compared with high similarity group, the frequency of inclusion fallacy in low similarity group was significant higher regardless of typicality of specific conclusion category and type of tasks, which suggested that it is the similarity not typicality contributed to inclusion fallacy effect. And the results supported there is potential strategy influenced human beings when they are making induction, that would not be abandoned with adults’ increasing concept competence and background knowledge, what’s more, specific and general conclusion category-based inductions were affected by the same factor,similarity, which implied they share the same cognitive process when people make these two inductions, supported Feature-based Model and Bayesian Model.Here in the second research, we compared the event-related potential responses to identical(e.g., inference from apples have property X to apples have property X),specific(e.g., inference from apples to bananas), and general conclusions(e.g.,inference from apples to fruits) in order to reveal dissociative neural signs between specific and general conclusions during category-based induction. the results showed specific-conclusion tasks evoked smaller P3 b components than did general-conclusion tasks, implied that P3 b is related to the retrieval of information associated with categorical membership in specific-conclusion tasks, which burdened memory process and cognition would decrease amplitude of P3 b.Furthermore, the results found that specific conclusions elicited larger N400 components than did general conclusions,suggesting greater cognitive effort for semantic integration was needed during specific conclusions than under general conclusions during category-based induction. These electrophysiological differences between two types of induction supported Similarity-covered Model and Hypothesis-assessment Model to some extent.Synthesize all of above, the results of two experiments supported different relevant models respectively, therefore, whether the specific and general conclusions category-based inductions for human beings share the same cognitive processing still could not be elaborated clearly, they may share different mental processing but withthe same judgment mechanism of induction-strength supported by the identical arithmetic. Besides, semantic verbal category-based induction task was employed, and from the behavior and ERPs perspective comparing the differences between two types of inductions directly provided new experience for further relevant researches.