Abstract
Thirty college students made category membership decisions for each of 540 candidate exemplar-category name pairs (e.g.,apple-fruit) in each of two separate sessions. For highly typical category members (e.g., chair for thefurniture category), and for items unrelated to a category (e.g.,cucumber-furniture), subjects agreed with each other and were consistent in their decisions. However, for intermediate-typicality items (e.g.,bookends-furniture), subjects disagreed with each other and were frequently inconsistent from one session to the next. These data suggest that natural categories are fuzzy sets, with no clear boundaries separating category members from nonmembers.
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McCIoskey, M., & Glucksberg, S.Decision processes in verifring inclusion statements Implications for models of semantic memory. Manuscript submitted for publication, 1977.
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This work was done while the first author held a National Science Foundation predoctoral fellowship. The research was supported by Public Health Service Research Grant MH 23401, S. Glucksberg, principal investigator.
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McCloskey, M.E., Glucksberg, S. Natural categories: Well defined or fuzzy sets?. Memory & Cognition 6, 462–472 (1978). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03197480
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03197480