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Rachel Stephens
Area of ResearchCognitive Psychology: Categorisation and feature inference
MembershipsAustralasian Society for Experimental Psychology Golden Key International Honour Society The University of Adelaide’s Psychology Students Association
Awards Brenda Nettle Bursary, AFUW-SA Trust Fund (June 2008)
Psychology Research InterestsMy research interests span across category-based feature inference, similarity, the status of category labels, decision making and modeling cognitive processes. The main focus of my PhD research project is feature inference. A fundamental and often taken-for-granted cognitive ability is that we are able to predict directly unobservable properties of objects or events, using pre-acquired concepts. For example, if we come across a cat we have never seen before, we can immediately predict that it probably chases birds and can meow. This ability allows us to have a sense of order about the world and a degree of foresight or control over the events around us. My project aims to resolve contradictions in recent literature regarding the types of information that people use when they draw on categories (e.g. cat) to infer hidden features (e.g. bird hunting).
Academic PapersStephens, R. G. & Navarro, D. J. (in press). One of these greebles is not like the others: Semi-supervised models for similarity structures. In V. Sloutsky, B. Love, & K. McRae (Eds.) Proceedings of the 30th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society |
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© 2005 The University of Adelaide Last Modified 25/11/2009 Psychology CRICOS Provider Number 00123M |