Type : Advanced Review VISUAL CATEGORY LEARNING Jennifer

Visual categories group together different objects as the same kinds of thing. We review a selection of research on how visual categories are learned. We begin with a guide to visual category learning experiments, describing a space of common manipulations of objects, categories, and methods used in the category learning literature. We open with a guide to these details in part because throughout our review we highlight how methodological details can sometimes loom large in theoretical discussions of visual category learning, how variations in methodological details can significantly affect our understanding of visual category learning, and how manipulations of methodological details can affect how visual categories are learned. We review a number of core theories of visual category learning, specifically those theories instantiated as computational models, highlighting just some of the experimental results that help distinguish between competing models. We examine behavioral and neural evidence for single versus multiple representational systems for visual category learning. We briefly discuss how visual category learning influences visual perception, describing empirical and brain imaging results that show how learning to categorize objects can influence how those objects are represented and perceived. We close with work that can potentially impact translation, describing recent experiments that explicitly manipulate key methodological details of category learning procedures with the goal of optimizing visual category learning. The ability to recognize objects as kinds of things is a valuable survival skill. It lets us apply what we have learned about one thing and generalize that knowledge to other things of the same kind. For example, after learning the hard way that a particular mushroom is probably poisonous, it is highly adaptive to generalize that knowledge to other similar mushrooms than to have to learn the hard way every time a new mushroom is encountered. Once a thing is categorized as a kind of thing, we can use our previously acquired knowledge about other members of its category to determine the best course of action. Should we eat it or not? Humans categorize to dizzying degrees. Some categories are commonplace, like when we categorize chairs from tables, trees from shrubs, or cats from dogs. Some are remarkable, like when an expert mycologist rapidly categorizes an edible mushroom from its similar but potentially deadly cousins. The same thing can be categorized at different levels of abstraction. That object you are sitting on might be a piece of furniture, a chair, and a …