Mentor
Luke Rosedahl - Dynamical Neuroscience
Advisor
Gregory Ashby - Psychology
Generalizing Learned Categories
Interns
Claudio Do - Biology
Emily Jimenez - Biology
Steve Regala - Mathematics
Joshua Wu - Biology
Project Description
Making category judgments is an essential part of the human condition. Is the dog hungry or not? Is this person friend or foe? Our ability to categorize things allows us to respond appropriately for the situation and is an essential survival trait (responding to a mountain lion the same way you would a cat is not a viable long-term strategy). One of the most mysterious aspects of human categorization is how we learn to generalize knowledge to new environments and situations. The first time you saw a mountain lion, for example, you likely categorized it into the “dangerous large cat-like object” category even though it might share little resemblance to a common housecat. The goal of this project is to explore the basis of how people learn to generalize categorization knowledge, specifically by seeing if people can generalize knowledge for simple stimuli after rotation.
Project Files
