Context, structure, and informativeness judgments: An extensive empirical investigation

• Published in: Memory & cognition 2020-10, Vol.48 (7), p.1089-1111
• Main Authors: Vigo, Ronaldo, Doan, Charles A., Basawaraj, Zeigler, Derek E.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Behavioral Science and Psychology; Cognitive Psychology; Decision making; Information theory; Prototypes; Psychological aspects; Psychology; Random variables
• ISSN: 0090-502X; 1532-5946
• DOI: 10.3758/s13421-020-01053-1

We explored the nature of human informativeness judgments: namely, people’s judgments about the quantity of information that object stimuli convey about the category of objects to which they belong. Informativeness judgments play a key role in everyday decision-making situations involving the selection of items from groups that best represent the “group as a whole.” They also provide insight into the nature of prototype formation. We investigated informativeness judgments with an experiment involving 41 category structures – the most comprehensive and rigorous examination thus far. We assess the robustness and generalizability of the results from this experiment by examining the relationship between group-level and individual-level performance. In addition, we show that in most cases (and especially in those involving relatively lower dimensionality structures), these judgments are predicted more accurately and explained more satisfactorily by Representational Information Theory (Vigo in Information Sciences 181: 4847–4859, 2011 and in Information 4(1):1–30, 2012 ) and its simplest core model than by standard models of prototypicality. Finally, we argue that prototypicality models are special cases of the more general “representational information” framework.