The role of instance retrieval in understanding complex concepts

Conceptual combination studies have found that a property is often judged more salient in a complex concept than in its constituents. Medin and Shoben (1988), for example, found that metal is more typical than wooden of the simple concept SPOON, whereas wooden is more typical than metal of the complex concept LARGE SPOON. We explored the possibility that such typicality reversals reflect a process of instance retrieval; that is, subjects base their typicality judgments on previously stored instances of LARGE SPOON. This hypothesis predicts that performance in a task requiring typicality judgments and one requiring instance retrieval would be correlated. Three experiments supported this prediction. Experiment 1 provided typicality reversals for a set of concepts. Subjects in Experiments 2 and 3 described instances of the concepts. Aspects of these descriptions were used to predict the reversals. The correlation between predicted and obtained typicality reversals was substantial, and higher for concepts for which subjects retrieved many instances.