Similarity and categorisation: getting dissociations in perspective

Dissociations between similarity and categorization have constituted critical counter-evidence to the view that categorization is similarity-based. However, there have been difficulties in replicating such dissociations. This paper reports three experiments. The first provides evidence of a double dissociation between similarity and categorization. The second and third show that by asking participants to make their judgments from particular perspectives, this dissociation disappears or is much reduced. It is argued that these data support a perspectival view of concepts, in which categorization is similarity-based, but where the dimensions used to make similarity and categorization judgments are partially fixed by perspective

Children's acquisition of science terms: does fast mapping work?

About the book: This proceedings contains 99 selected papers from the 8th Conference of the International Association for the Study of Child Language (IASCL) held in Donostia-San Sebastián in the Spanish Basque Country in July 1999. The proceedings includes the plenary addresses by Jean-Paul Bronckart, Brian MacWhinney, and Miquel Siguan. The other 96 papers are organized into sections on bilingualism, discourse, phonology, language disorders, lexicon, morphology, syntax, and signed languages. Several of these sections include symposia with introductions as well as individual papers

On the Psychological Basis for Rigid Designation

Kripke (1972) and Putnam (1975a; 1975b) have argued forcefully for the philosophical view of word meaning known as rigid designation. While certain psychological studies have appeared to offer this view support (Keil, 1986; Rips, 1989), we argue that these have not provided an exhaustive evaluation. In particular, the original discussions of Kripke and Putnam reveal that their view rests on an explicit appeal to intuition concerning word use in a range of different scenarios. The study reported here investigates word use under three such types of scenarios, for a variety of natural kind terms, by investigating subjects' judgements of truth or falsity for a range of statement types. W e argue that the results obtained indicate that the intuition on which rigid designation rests is not one which is generally true of agents' language use. Further, we obtam patterns of apparent contradiction which appear strictly inconsistent with rigid designation and which require an account of word meaning which allows that the sense of words may vary systematically with context (Franks & Braisby, 1990)

Perspectives, compositionality and complex concepts

Representational systems such as language, mind and perhaps even the brain exhibit a structure that is often assumed to be compositional. That is, the semantic value of a complex representation is determined by the semantic value of their parts and the way they are put together. Dating back to the late 19th century, the principle of compositionality has regained wide attention recently. Since the principle has been dealt with very differently across disciplines, the aim of the two volumes is to bring together the diverging approaches. They assemble a collection of original papers that cover the topic of compositionality from virtually all perspectives of interest in the contemporary debate. The well-chosen international list of authors includes psychologists, neuroscientists, computer scientists, linguists, and philosophers. The second volume is devoted to issues of compositionality that arouse in the sciences of language, the investigation of the mind, and the modeling of representational brain functions. How could compositional languages evolve? How many sentences are needed to learn a compositional language? How does compositionality relate to the interpretation of texts, the generation of idioms and metaphors, and the understanding of aberrant expressions? What psychological mechanism underlies the combination of complex concepts? And finally, what neuronal structure can possibly realize a compositional system of mental representations

Deference in categorisation: evidence for essentialism?

Many studies appear to show that categorization conforms to psychological essentialism (e.g., Gelman & Wellman, 1991). However, key implications of essentialism have not been scrutinized. These are that people’s categorizations should shift as their knowledge of micro-structural properties shift, and that people should defer in their categorizations to appropriate experts. Three studies are reported. The first shows that even gross changes in genetic structure do not radically shift categorizations of living kinds. The second and third reveal a pattern of conditional deference to experts, coupled with systematic deference to non-experts. It is argued that these results point towards only a partial role for essentialism in explaining categorization, and a continuing role for theories that emphasize the importance of appearance and/or functional properties

Introduction: foundations of cognitive psychology

About the book: Cognitive processes enable us to experience the world around us: to recognise familiar faces, to communicate to one another through speech and writing, to feel emotion as we recall memories from the past. Cognitive Psychology provides a dynamic and exciting insight into this illuminating subject, leading us through such topics as attention, memory, judgement and decision making, and introducing us to the latest computational and imaging techniques through which our understanding of these topics is being continually enhanced. With state-of-the-art introductions from internationally recognised experts, Cognitive Psychology conveys a sense of excitement in the subject which will be sure to engage and enthuse any student

Deference and essentialism in the categorization of chemical kinds

Abstract Psychological essentialism has been subject to much debate. Yet a key implication -that people should defer to experts in categorizing natural kinds -has not been widely examined. Three experiments examine deference in the categorization of chemical kinds. The first establishes borderline cases used in the second and third. These latter show limited deference to experts, and some deference to non-experts. These data are consistent with a perspectival framework for concepts in which categorization is sometimes based on micro-structural properties and sometimes on appearance and function

Seeds of doubt: are children taught to be essentialists?

About the book: The aim of the European Cognitive Science Conference is the presentation of empirical, theoretical, and analytic work from all areas of interest in cognitive science, such as artificial intelligence, education, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, and anthropology. The focus is on interdisciplinary work that is either of interest for more than one of the research areas mentioned or integrates research methods from different fields. With contributions by cognitive scientists from 20 different countries, the papers in this volume reflect the origins of this conference, as well as its international scope