Knowledge and Concepts
How do the concepts you have affect your behavior? How are human concepts structured in the brain? What determines the structure?
To stduy human concepts, we study the way people form new categories because categories are the very basic way of organizing concepts and knowledge. "Desk," "table," "furniture," fruit," or "vegetable" -- these concepts are all categorically organized. The way we form categories will therefore tell us the way we form concepts. Learning new concepts is clearly different from recording facts, because concepts involve generalization. Then, how do we learn concepts. In our lab, we are investigating whether different methods of concept learning (learning concepts by classifying or learning concepts by making inferences) will give rise to different types of generalization.
Yamauchi, T., & Markman, A.B. (1998). Category learning by inference and classification. Journal of Memory an Language, 39, 124-148.
Yamauchi, T., & Markman, A. B. (2000). Learning categories composed of varying instances: The effect of classification, inference and structural alignment. Memory & Cognition. 28(1), 64-78.
Yamauchi, T., Love, B. C., & Markman, A. B. (2002). Learning nonlinearly separable categories by inference and classification. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition, 28 (3), 585-593.
Yamauchi, T. (in press). Finding abstract commonalties of category members. Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence.
Reasoning and Judging
We all know that our behavior is very much a product of our belief. Everyone has his / her belief, We form "concepts" about the world (our belief), and our concepts influence profoundly our reasoning and judgments. But how come? what is the link between them? What is the mechanism underlying it? In our lab, we are studying how categorical knowledge affects people's reasoning and judgments.
Yamauchi, T. (2005). Labeling bias and categorical induction: Generative aspects of category information. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 31, 538-553.
Yamauchi, T., Kohn, N., & Yu, N. Y. (2007). Tracking mouse movement in feature inference: Category labels are different from feature labels. Memory & Cognition, 35, 852-863.
Yamauchi, T. & Yu, N. (2008). Category labels versus feature labels: Category labels polarize inferential predictions. Memory & Cognition. 36 (3), 544-553
Yamauchi, T. (2008) Linking syntax and inductive reasoning: Categorical labeling and generic noun phrases. Psychologia.51, 1-13
Perceiving and Understanding
What is the origin of human knowledge? Clearly, perception plays an important role. Then, the next question can be how do we perceive objects? One important concept in addressing this question is to think about the issue of "representation." Take a look at the 3-D objects below. How do we "represent" these objects in the mind? What will be the format?
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Yamauchi, T., Cooper, L. A., Hilton, H. J., Szerlip, N. J., Chen, H. C, & Barnhardt, T. M. (2006). Priming for symmetry detection of three-dimensional figures: Central axes can prime symmetry detection separately from local components. Visual Cognition, 13, 363-397.
Yu, Y., Yamauchi, T., & Choe, Y. (2004). Explaining low-level brightness-contrast illusions using disinhibition. In A. J. Ijspeert, D. Mange, and N. Shojiro (Eds.), Biologically Inspired Approaches to Advanced Information Technology, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 3141, 166-175, New York: Springer.