{"pk":26478,"title":"Do additional features help or harm during category learning?An exploration of the curse of dimensionality in human learners","subtitle":null,"abstract":"How does the number of features impact category learning?One view suggests that additional features creates a “curse ofdimensionality” - where having more features causes the sizeof the search space to grow so quickly that discovering goodclassification rules becomes increasingly challenging. The op-posing view suggests that additional features provide a wealthof additional information which learners should be able to useto improve their classification performance. Previous researchexploring this issue appears to have produced conflicting re-sults: some find that learning improves with additional features(Hoffman & Murphy, 2006) while others find that it does not(Minda & Smith, 2001; Edgell et al., 1996). Here we inves-tigate the possibility that category structure may explain thisapparent discrepancy – that more features are useful in cate-gories with family resemblance structure, but are not (and mayeven be harmful) in more rule-based categories. We find whilethe impact of having many features does indeed depend on cat-egory structure, the results can be explained by a single unifiedmodel: one that attends to a single feature on any given trialand uses information learned from that particular feature tomake classification judgments.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Category learning; supervised learning; curse ofdimensionality"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/03888250","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Wai","middle_name":"Keen","last_name":"Vong","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Adelaide","department":""},{"first_name":"Andrew","middle_name":"T.","last_name":"Hendrickson","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Adelaide","department":""},{"first_name":"Amy","middle_name":"","last_name":"Perfors","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Adelaide","department":""},{"first_name":"Daniel","middle_name":"J.","last_name":"Navarro","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of New South Wales","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2016-01-01T21:00:00+03:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26478/galley/16114/download/"}]}