Feature frequency and hypothesis testing in the acquisition of rule-governed concepts

Abstract

Alternative explanations of how people learn rule-governed concepts, frequency theory and hypothesis theory, were contrasted in a feature-identification task. On each trial of a problem, subjects received multiple instances of a biconditional concept. These were arranged so that some features occurred with high frequency and others with low frequency. Subjects provided a hypothesis about the pair .of relevant features and, on some trials, attempted to recall the hypothesis given on the preceding trial. At the end of each problem, subjects described the prototype, the instance that best represented all exemplars. The results were as follows: (1) High-frequency features were sampled as hypotheses more often than would be expected on the basis of random sampling, (2) prototype descriptions included more high-frequency features than would be expected by chance, and (3) previous hypotheses were accurately recalled. Whereas the last finding supports hypothesis theory, the other results confirm predictions of frequency theory. It was concluded that a satisfactory account of concept learning may need to incorporate elements of both theories. © 1970 Psychonomic Society, Inc.