Asking people whether a tomato is fruit, or whether chess is a sport, reveals differences between individuals’ concepts. How can the same perceptual information result in different representations? Perhaps people’s initial attention to particular category information determines what representations they will form. When first learning about chess, for example, attention to its competitive aspect...

The arguments of Fodor, Garret, Walker and Parkes [(1980) Against de® nitions, Cognition, 8, 263± 367] are the source of widespread skepticism in cognitive science about lexical semantic structure. Whereas the thesis that lexical items, and the concepts they express, have decompositional structure (i.e. have signi® cant constituents) was at one time a one of those ideas that hardly anybody [in ...

Categories are essential for practically all aspects of human cognition, and an enormous amount of research has been devoted to understanding how they are learned and represented in memory (see, e.g., Murphy, 2002; Smith & Medin, 1981). In this chapter, I describe a program of research on category learning that Gordon Bower and I began a number of years ago, when I was a graduate student in his...

It is often asserted that young children’s word learning is guided by constraints or internal biases. Constraints are broadly described as ‘‘any factor that favors some possibilities over others’’ (Medin et al., 1990). Researchers have argued that specialized lexical constraints cause children to make some inferences about word meanings before others. An analysis shows that the concept constrai...

Context and cognition: Introduction (Contexte et cognition: introduction) r Guy Tiberghien 105 Context and sensory processes: ln search of basic laws (Contexte et processus senso-~ riels : à la recherche des lois fondamentales) t .' Lawrence E. Marks 121 \, Visual perception in context (La perception visuelle en contexte) ~ Claude Bonnet 137 Context effects in episodic memory: a review (Les eff...

We examined the time-course of the utilization of background knowledge in perceptual categorization by manipulating the meaningfulness of labels associated with categories and by manipulating the amount of time given to subjects to make a categorization decision. Extending a paradigm originally reported by Wisniewski and Medin (1994), subjects learned two categories of children's drawings that ...

As the title indicates, this is a review of recent American studies on the epidemiology of poliomyelitis. It will also include some of the old and better known opinions on this subject, and these will be considered in the light of new findings. Fortunately, perhaps, there will not be room to cover all current and pertinent American literature and so the review will be limited in its content to ...

Similarity is a fundamental concept in cognition. In 1977, Amos Tversky published a highly influential feature-based model of how people judge the similarity between objects. The model highlights the context-dependence of similarity judgments, and challenged geometric models of similarity. One of the context-dependent effects Tversky describes is the diagnosticity principle. The diagnosticity p...

The theory-based model of categorization posits that concepts are represented as theories rather than as feature lists. Thus, it is particularly interesting that the DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association, 1994), establishes a set of atheoretical guidelines for diagnosis in the domain of mental disorders. Five experiments investigated how clinicians handle an atheoretical nosology. Clinical p...