Most natural domains can be represented in multiple ways: we can categorize foods in terms of their nutritional content or social role, animals in terms of their taxonomic groupings or their ecological niches, and musical instruments in terms of their taxonomic categories or social uses. Previous approaches to modeling human categorization have…

The aim of the present study was to explore the spatial organization of auditory time and the effects of the manipulation of spatial attention on such a representation. In two experiments, we asked 28 adults to classify the duration of auditory stimuli as "short" or "long". Stimuli were tones of high or low pitch, delivered left or right of the…

Humans can rapidly extract object and category information from an image despite surprising limitations in detecting changes to the individual parts of that image. In this article we provide evidence that the construction of a perceptual whole, or Gestalt, reduces awareness of changes to the parts of this object. This result suggests that the…

Three experiments with 88 college-aged participants explored how unlabeled experiences--learning episodes in which people encounter objects without information about their category membership--influence beliefs about category structure. Participants performed a simple one-dimensional categorization task in a brief supervised learning phase, then…

Is processing of conceptual information as robust as processing of perceptual information early in development? Existing empirical evidence is insufficient to answer this question. To examine this issue, 3- to 5-year-old children were presented with a flexible categorization task, in which target items (e.g., an open red umbrella) shared category…

Several psychophysical and neuropsychological investigations have suggested that the mental representation of numbers takes the form of a number line along which magnitude is positioned in ascending order according to our reading habits. A longstanding debate is whether this spatial frame is triggered automatically as intrinsic part of the number…

Rule-based and information-integration category learning were compared under minimal and full feedback conditions. Rule-based category structures are those for which the optimal rule is verbalizable. Information-integration category structures are those for which the optimal rule is not verbalizable. With minimal feedback subjects are told whether…

Category learning can be achieved by identifying common features among category members, distinctive features among non-members, or both. These processes are psychologically and computationally distinct, and may have implications for the acquisition of categories at different hierarchical levels. The present study examines an account of children's…

Adults, preschool children, and nonhuman primates detect and categorize food objects according to substance information, conveyed primarily by color and texture. In contrast, they perceive and categorize artifacts primarily by shape and rigidity. The present experiments investigated the origins of this distinction. Using a looking time procedure,…

Do young children who seek the conceptual kind of an artifact weigh the plausibility that a current function constitutes the function intended by the object designer? Three- and four-year-olds were encouraged to question adults about novel artifacts. After inquiring about what an object was, some children were shown a function that plausibly…

Different intuitive theories constrain and guide inferences in different contexts. Formalizing simple intuitive theories as probabilistic processes operating over structured representations, we present a new computational model of category-based induction about causally transmitted properties. A first experiment demonstrates undergraduates'…

It has been claimed that Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by a limited ability to process perceptual stimuli in reference to the contextual information of the percept. Such a connection between a nonholistic processing style and behavioral traits associated with ASD is thought to exist also within the neurotypical population albeit…

Here, we investigate how activation of mental representations of categories during analogical reasoning influences subsequent cognitive processing. Specifically, we present and test the central predictions of the "Micro-Category" account of analogy. This account emphasizes the role of categories in aligning terms for analogical mapping. In a…

This report examines whether knowledge about function influences the formation of artifact categories in 11-12- month old infants. Using an object-examination task, a set of artificial stimuli was presented that could either be grouped according to overall similarity or according to similarity in one functionally relevant part. Experiment 1…

Many concepts have stereotypes. This leaves open the question of whether concepts "are" stereotypes. It has been argued elsewhere that theories that identify concepts with their stereotypes or with stereotypical properties of their instances (e.g., Rosch, E. (1978). "Principles of categorization." In E. Rosch & B. B. Lloyd (Ed.), "Cognition and…