[Previous] [Next]

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