Building The New Onto The Old: Category Constraints on Category Formation

It is generally accepted that the process of forming a new category is biased by the learner’s prior knowledge. In this context, numerous studies and models have paid attention to the effects of prior domain theories on the process of forming new categories. What is yet to be understood is how this process of acquiring new knowledge might be affected by background knowledge of the very same type, i.e. by prior categories. This paper presents a few experiments showing how the formation of new categories might be facilitated by a high overlap between the new and the old categories, where overlap is operationalized as the mutual entropy between the two.