Abstract: Theories of categorization and reasoning rely heavily on undergraduates as their participant pool, at least hoping and perhaps expecting that the results will generalize to the world at large. This talk describes ongoing work on categorization and reasoning among novices and experts and across cultures. Much of this work employs a “triangulation strategy” to address some of the difficulties associated with cross-group comparison. The modal pattern for these comparisons is that undergraduates are the “odd group out,” including for such fundamental phenomena as the basic level, typicality effects and the use of categories in reasoning. This has obvious implications for theories of cognition.
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