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 probabilistic, context-dependent, and derived from bundles of correlated features and ordinary processes of perceiving and The literature appears to cycle through these two classes of accounts, advancing with each pass through but never quite leaving these two general points of view. Many of the contentious issues in the developmental literature on concepts and categories are variants of this debate. Accordingly, this review begins with a brief history of theories of categories. This is as history of back-and-forth transitions between a focus on more the more stable and the more probabilistic aspects of categories and it is a debate that is not resolved. However, by either view, categories result from internal representations that capture the structure in the world. Accordingly, the review of the developmental literature is organized with respect to recent advances in understanding outside-the-mind factors that organize and recruit the cognitive processes that create categories: the statistical regularities in the learning environment, the cognitive tasks and the nested time scales of the internal processes they recruit, and the body which is the interface between the external world and cognition. Back – and – forth theories.