Abstract
The present study involved comparing the learning of disjunctive concepts when information is presented by the use of all positive instances or all negative instances. The series of disjunctive concepts varied in complexity in terms of number of dimensions and values. 128 college students served as Ss and 4 different stimulus sets of varying complexity were used. All negative instances groups performed significantly better than positive-instances groups and task complexity was significant. These results were interpreted as support for Bourne's hypothesis that negative instances provide more information about disjunctive concepts than positive instances.
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