Context, structure, and informativeness judgments: An extensive empirical investigation
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Context, structure, and informativeness judgments: An extensive empirical investigation Ronaldo Vigo 1,2 & Charles A. Doan 2,3
&
Basawaraj 1,2 & Derek E. Zeigler 2,4
# The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Abstract We explored the nature of human informativeness judgments: namely, people’s judgments about the quantity of information that object stimuli convey about the category of objects to which they belong. Informativeness judgments play a key role in everyday decision-making situations involving the selection of items from groups that best represent the “group as a whole.” They also provide insight into the nature of prototype formation. We investigated informativeness judgments with an experiment involving 41 category structures – the most comprehensive and rigorous examination thus far. We assess the robustness and generalizability of the results from this experiment by examining the relationship between group-level and individual-level performance. In addition, we show that in most cases (and especially in those involving relatively lower dimensionality structures), these judgments are predicted more accurately and explained more satisfactorily by Representational Information Theory (Vigo in Information Sciences 181: 4847–4859, 2011 and in Information 4(1):1–30, 2012) and its simplest core model than by standard models of prototypicality. Finally, we argue that prototypicality models are special cases of the more general “representational information” framework. Keywords Information . Representational information . Prototypicality . Informativeness judgments . Invariance . Relational cognition
Introduction
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-020-01053-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Ronaldo Vigo [email protected] * Charles A. Doan [email protected] Basawaraj [email protected] Derek E. Zeigler [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, Ohio University, Athens, OH, USA
2
Consortium for the Advancement of Cognitive Science, Ohio University, Athens, OH, USA
3
Department of Psychology, Marietta College, Marietta, OH 45750, USA
4
Department of Psychology and Education, Columbus State Community College, Columbus, OH, USA
Information, as a universal construct, plays a fundamental role in contemporary science. In fact, the construct plays a central role in Data Science, Informatics, Bioinformatics, and Cognitive Science, as well as an important role in much older fields like Physics and Chemistry, to name a few. Yet, perhaps because of its multifaceted, fundamental, general, and ubiquitous nature, it has resisted a precise definition that completely conveys its meaning in a domain-independent fashion. Indeed, entire journal issues have been devoted to the enterprise of determining the best way of defining information (e.g., Logan, 2012). Unfortunately, unlike mass, energy, time, and any other of the fundamental physical quantities, there is no universally agreed upon definition and, consequently
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