ArticleNature human behaviour2024
A model of conceptual bootstrapping in human cognition.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Mental bootstrapping enables human-level concept learning in self-supervised deep models.Science advances · 2026Article
- When less is more: single selfhood-related cues elicit higher selfhood ratings than multiple cues.Frontiers in cognition · 2026Article
- The myth of the Bayesian brain.European journal of applied physiology · 2025Review
- Teaching Recombinable Motifs Through Simple Examples.Cognitive science · 2025Article
- Seeking New Information With Old Questions: Children and Adults Reuse and Recombine Concepts From Prior Questions.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Reconciling shared versus context-specific information in a neural network model of latent causes.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Two-Hour Nicotine Withdrawal Improves Inhibitory Control Dysfunction in Male Smokers: Evidence from a Smoking-Cued Go/No-Go Task ERP Study.Neuropsychiatric disease and treatment · 2024Article
- Identifying Transfer Learning in the Reshaping of Inductive Biases.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
To tackle a hard problem, it is often wise to reuse and recombine existing knowledge. Such an ability to bootstrap enables us to grow rich mental concepts despite limited cognitive resources. Here we present a computational model of conceptual bootstrapping. This model uses a dynamic conceptual repertoire that can cache and later reuse elements of earlier insights in principled ways, modelling learning as a series of compositional generalizations. This model predicts systematically different learned concepts when the same evidence is processed in different orders, without any extra assumptions about previous beliefs or background knowledge. Across four behavioural experiments (total n = 570), we demonstrate strong curriculum-order and conceptual garden-pathing effects that closely resemble our model predictions and differ from those of alternative accounts. Taken together, this work offers a computational account of how past experiences shape future conceptual discoveries and showcases the importance of curriculum design in human inductive concept inferences.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.