The role of goal constructs in conceptual acquisition

Within a given situation, an individual's goal motivates and structures how they interact with their surroundings. The goal also organizes the available information and specifies the role of a given item or attribute in terms of how it relates to the other aspects of the situation. We propose these ideas should inform the study of concept acquisition. There is abundant evidence that the goal orients an individual to goal-relevant attributes of items during concept acquisition. A more speculative claim is that the goal structures the conceptual knowledge acquired. We introduce a new paradigm for examining goal-directed concept acquisition (Experiment 1) and then assess how both attention to an attribute and its goal-relevance affect its centrality within the acquired concept (Experiment 2). Participants were given items to use as they completed a specified task. In both experiments, we found evidence that task goals oriented participants to goal-relevant attributes of the items. Category-based ratings for items during a transfer task, as well as how the participants sorted the items into groups, indicated that the goal-relevant attributes were more central within the acquired concepts. In Experiment 2, we found that the goal-relevance of the attribute, beyond attentional allocation to the attribute during the task, affected the organization of attribute information within the acquired concept. These results support the thesis that information captured within the conceptual knowledge is structured with respect to the goal.