Ad hoc categories

People construct ad hoc categories to achieve goals. For example, constructing the category of “things to sell at a garage sale” can be instrumental to achieving the goal of selling unwanted possessions. These categories differ from common categories (e.g., “fruit,” “furniture”) in that ad hoc categories violate the correlational structure of the environment and are not well established in memory. Regarding the latter property, the category concepts, concept-to-instance associations, and instance-to-concept associations structuring ad hoc categories are shown to be much less established in memory than those of common categories. Regardless of these differences, however, ad hoc categories possess graded structures (i.e., typicality gradients) as salient as those structuring common categories. This appears to be the result of a similarity comparison process that imposes graded structure on any category regardless of type

The Covenant Never Revoked: Biblical Reflections on a Christian-Jewish Dialogue

Reviewed Book: Lohfink, Norbert. The Covenant Never Revoked: Biblical Reflections on a Christian-Jewish Dialogue. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1991

Classification systems offer a microcosm of issues in conceptual processing: A commentary on Kemmerer (2016)

This is a commentary on Kemmerer (2016), Categories of Object Concepts Across Languages and Brains: The Relevance of Nominal Classification Systems to Cognitive Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1080/23273798.2016.1198819

Finding Leaders for Tomorrow\u27s Churches: The Growing Crisis in Clergy Recruitment

Reviewed Book: Oswald, Roy M. Finding Leaders for Tomorrow\u27s Churches: The Growing Crisis in Clergy Recruitment. Washington, DC: Alban Inst, 1993

What does semantic tiling of the cortex tell us about semantics?

Recent use of voxel-wise modeling in cognitive neuroscience suggests that semantic maps tile the cortex. Although this impressive research establishes distributed cortical areas active during the conceptual processing that underlies semantics, it tells us little about the nature of this processing. While mapping concepts between Marr's computational and implementation levels to support neural encoding and decoding, this approach ignores Marr's algorithmic level, central for understanding the mechanisms that implement cognition, in general, and conceptual processing, in particular. Following decades of research in cognitive science and neuroscience, what do we know so far about the representation and processing mechanisms that implement conceptual abilities? Most basically, much is known about the mechanisms associated with: (1) features and frame representations, (2) grounded, abstract, and linguistic representations, (3) knowledge-based inference, (4) concept composition, and (5) conceptual flexibility. Rather than explaining these fundamental representation and processing mechanisms, semantic tiles simply provide a trace of their activity over a relatively short time period within a specific learning context. Establishing the mechanisms that implement conceptual processing in the brain will require more than mapping it to cortical (and sub-cortical) activity, with process models from cognitive science likely to play central roles in specifying the intervening mechanisms. More generally, neuroscience will not achieve its basic goals until it establishes algorithmic-level mechanisms that contribute essential explanations to how the brain works, going beyond simply establishing the brain areas that respond to various task conditions

Define design thinking

No abstract available