Concepts and Categorization

Abstract

Whenever people think of an object as something (e.g. that Fido is a dog, a pet, or loyal), they are categorizing it using their internal concepts. A concept is a mental representation that allows different things to be treated equivalently for some purpose. People learn concepts to facilitate communication, to make useful predictions about their world, to create mental building blocks for expressing more sophisticated thoughts, and to form efficient representations for objects and situations. We discuss five approaches to how concepts are learned and represented: rules, prototypes, exemplars, category boundaries, and theories. Whereas some of these approaches leave the impression that concepts are isolated mental structures, connections between concepts are also critically important. We discuss connections between concepts and perception that link categorization to object recognition and serve to ground concepts in the world. Consistent with this connection, concepts and perceptual processes mutually influence one another. We also describe connections between concepts and language that allow concepts to subserve abstract communication, and for language needs to reciprocally affect concepts. Finally, we predict future directions for concept learning research, including formal computational modeling and educational applications.

Supervised and unsupervised learning of multidimensional acoustic categories.

“…Among these are whether categories are abstracted as prototypes or stored as sets of experienced exemplars (or something in between), and when verbal descriptions of categories guide learners' decisions (see, e.g., Goldstone & Kersten, 2003). Here, we focused on two issues: first, how well listeners can learn two similar, distributionally defined auditory categories given limited supervised or unsupervised exposure; and second, how this learning is influenced by whether the category structures demand attention to one versus two dimensions of variation.…”

Category learning in the context of co-presented items

“…The learning process takes place across a series of guessand-correct trials in which an instance is presented, a classification response is generated, and corrective feedback is given. This procedure removes a host of potentially confounding variables and has contributed to an extensive and valuable empirical literature on the basic nature of category learning and category representation (see Goldstone andKersten 2003, andMurphy 2002, for reviews), but recent research has begun to explore how some of the variables stripped away by the basic category learning paradigm might affect the process of category learning. Of particular interest is how the context in which items are made available to the learner might affect the nature of the learning that occurs.…”

Visually Grounded Meaning Representations

“…The task of categorization (i.e., grouping objects into meaningful categories) is a classic problem in the field of cognitive science, central to perception, learning, and the use of language (see [87] for an overview). Existing models typically focus on a single modality, either perception or language (but see [31], [37] for exceptions).…”