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Generalization
- one operation that people seem to be very good at is collapsing over a
set of instances to establish a general trend
- for instance, we might
ask "Are Americans more extroverted than Australians?"
- unless you have
read the studies claiming that they are, then your only
recourse would be to collapse across the set of Americans and the set
Australians you know and to extract some form of central tendency
measure on the extrovert/introvert dimension
- this is quite a
difficult computation, but one that people perform routinely
- the IAC
network can accomplish spontaneous generalisation of this kind by
activating a property and cycling
- the resulting pattern of activation represents the sorts of features
most commonly associated with that property