Thinking and Deciding, Jonathan Baron, Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113714/1/3960030207_ftp.pd

What's so essential about essentialism? A different perspective on the interaction of perception, language, and conceptual knowledge

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/30864/1/0000527.pd

When humans become animals: Development of the animal category in early childhood

a b s t r a c t The current study examines 3-and 5-year-olds' representation of the concept we label 'animal' and its two nested concepts -animal contrastive (including only non-human animals) and animal inclusive (including both humans and non-human animals). Building upon evidence that naming promotes object categorization, we introduced a novel noun for two distinct objects, and analyzed children's patterns of extension. In Experiment 1, children heard a novel noun in conjunction with two non-human animals (dog, bird). Here, both 3-and 5-year-olds readily accessed animal contrastive and extended the noun systematically to other (previously un-named) non-human animals. In Experiment 2, children heard a novel noun in conjunction with a human and non-human animal. Here, 5-year-olds (but not 3-year-olds) accessed animal inclusive and extended the noun systematically to humans and non-human animals. These results underscore the developmental challenge facing young children as they identify the scope of the fundamental biological term 'animal' and its corresponding, nested concept(s)

A two-stage model of category construction

The current consensus is that most natural categories are not organized around strict definitions (a list of singly necessary and jointly sufficient features) but rather according to a family resemblance (FR) principle: Objects belong to the same category because they are similar to each other and dissimilar to objects in contrast categories. A number of computational models of category construction have been developed to provide an account of how and why people create FR categories [Anderson, 1990]; [Fisher, 1987]. Surprisingly, however, only a few experiments on category construction or free sorting have been run and they suggest that people do not sort examples by the FR principle. We report several new experiments and a two-stage model for category construction. This model is contrasted with a variety of other models with respect to their ability to account for when FR sorting will and will not occur. The experiments serve to identify one basis for FR sorting and to support the two-stage model. The distinctive property of the two-stage model is that it assumes that people impose more structure than the examples support in the first stage and that the second stage adjusts for this difference between preferred and perceived structure. We speculate that people do not simply assimilate probabilistic structures but rather organize them in terms of discrete structures plus noise.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/30288/1/0000690.pd