Effects Of Complexity Of Uncertain Categories On Reasoning Strategies' Usages

Uncertain categories means that we can see the representative members of categories but can't know what on earth these categories have.Four different strate-gies which include single-category feature-conjunction strategy,multiple-category feature-conjunction strategy,single-category disconnection strategy and multiple-category disconnection strategy were used under uncertain categories.Structure of categories affects usages of reasoning strategies,but we don't know if complexity of uncertain categories has similar effect.Figuring out this quesetion helps us quantify structure of categories.Therefore,in the present study,we explored if complexity of uncertain categories affects people's usages of reasoning strategies.In the first experiment,information entropy was used to evaluate and control the complexities of uncertain categories.Situations were divided into four different parts which included single-category feature-conjunction situation,multiple-category feature-conjunction situation,disconnection situation and integral situation.In our research,each situation included 4 detailed situations,participants need to answer questions based on each detailed situation,and 4 detailed situations used the same underlying categorical structure but the assignment of feature dimensions was diff-erent.In each detailed situation,participants were shown a probe exemplar with a given feature and asked to predict its most likely value on a different feature dimen-sion(feature prediction)and its most likely category membership(classification).We found their reasoning methods through feature prediction questions for each option corresponding to a certain method.They were also asked to estimate degrees of certainty about their answers of each question being right(0-100,0 represents entirely uncertain while 100 represents entirely certain),we used these statistics to select participants who thought they were facing uncertain situations.Each category included 16 examples,each example had 3 dimensions.The result showed that participants in complex multiple-category feature-conjunction situation used more single strategies and less multiple-category feature-conjunction strategies than in simple situations.Complexity of other situations didn't affect usages of reasoning strategies by and large.In the second experiment,complexity of uncertain categories was controlled by limiting participants' inducing time.Participants in complex situation had limition of 1 min each circumstance while participants in simple situation didn't.Results were sim-ilar to results of the first experiment,compared with participants in simple situations,participants in complex situation used more single-category feature-conjunction strategies and less multiple-category feature-conjunction strategies.That is to say,frequencies of options corresponding to single strategy in complex situation were significantly larger than in single situation,it is similar with frequencies of multiple strategy.Situations were found to distinguish whether people used conception of category when they used multiple-category feature-conjunction strategy in the third experiment.Options corresponding to using conception of category were different from options corresponding to not using,thus we can tell whether participants used conception of category through the frequencies of different options.Participants turned out to use conception of category when they used multiple strategy.Meanwhile,they chose more options corresponding to using conception of category in simple situation than in complex situation.In summary,present research conducted three experiments and found out that complexity of uncertain category affected usages of reasoning strategies.Participants used more single-category feature-conjunction strategy and less multiple-category feature-conjunction strategy in more complex situations,they also had less conception of category.So complexity of uncertain category needed to be control in further study.