Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Effects Of Proportion Of Positive Instances And Degree Of Restriction On The Induction Of A Principle, Dennis C. Dervin

Student Work

An experiment is reported in which student subjects attempted to discover a principle by pairing number and letters. Seven groups of subjects varied on two dimensions, proportion of positive instances sampled and degree of restriction in choosing number-letter pairs. It was found that subjects who sampled a higher proportion of positive instances were more successful that those sampling a lower proportion. Furthermore, subjects who were unrestricted in their choice of number-letter pairs, because they sampled a higher proportion of positive instances, performed more efficiently than subjects who were restricted and sampled a lower proportion of positive instances. Finally, when both …