Reviews: Biological Psychology, Knowledge, Concepts, and Categories

Running Head: CONCEPTS AND CATEGORIES To Appear in: Annual Review of Psychology – 2009 Concepts and Categories: A Cognitive Neuropsychological Perspective

One of the most provocative and exciting issues in cognitive science is how neural specificity for semantic categories of common objects arises in the functional architecture of the brain. Over two decades of research on the neuropsychological phenomenon of category-specific semantic deficits has generated detailed claims about the organization and representation of conceptual knowledge. More r...

Person-specific Knowledge and Knowledge of Biological Categories

We report new findings from a neurological case described by Hanley, Young, and Pearson (1989). In the original study, the patient, BD, had impaired biographical knowledge of people which appeared to extend to a general impairment of knowledge of “living things”. In more recent work, we present evidence which confirms Hanley et al.’s finding that BD has impaired person-specific knowledge, but w...

1 Developing categories and concepts

The literature on concept development is highly contentious because there is a lot at stake. The processes that give rise to categories are at the very core of how we understand human cognition. In broad strokes, the debate is about whether categories reflect internal representations that are highly stable symbolic proposition-like and manipulated via logical operators or, whether they are prob...

Concepts across categories

Verbs or adjectives and their nominalizations and certain adverb adjective pairs can be argued to introduce the same concept. This can be shown through inference patterns, which can be explained if we assume Davidsonian eventualities underlying all predicates. We make a contribution to the underlying state discussion by investigating the advantages and disadvantages of Davidsonian versus Kimian...

Folk Psychology and Mental Concepts