probe such as a category name, and that a norm is This work was supported by the Office of Naval Research under Grant NR 197-058, and by grants from the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada and from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (410-68-0583). Dale Griffin, Leslie McPherson, and Daniel Read provided valuable assistance. Many friends and col...

In this article I propose that categorization decisions are often made relative to causal models of categories that people possess. According to this causal-model theory o f categorization, evidence of an exemplar's membership in a category consists of the likelihood that such an exemplar can be generated by the category's causal model. Bayesian networks are proposed as a representation of thes...

A well-established finding in research on concepts and categories is that some members are rated as better or more typical examples than others. It is generally thought that typicality reflects centrality, that is, that typical examples are those that are similar to many other members of the category. This interpretation of typicality is based on studies in which participants had little knowled...

Theories of similarity generally agree that the similarity ofa pair increases with its commonalities and decreases with its differences. Recent research suggests that this comparison process involves an alignment of structured representations yielding commonalities, differences related to the commonalities, and differences unrelated to the commonalities. One counterintuitive prediction of this ...

Similarity is a compelling part of everyday experience . In the visual world, objects that are similar in shape or color may seem to leap to our attention . In conceptual processing, we have an immediate sense of whether a pair of concepts is similar . The prominence of similarity in conscious experience has made it an important explanatory construct in psychological theories . New problems are...

Many concepts have stereotypes. This leaves open the question of whether concepts are stereotypes. It has been argued elsewhere that theories that identify concepts with their stereotypes or with stereotypical properties of their instances (e.g., Rosch, E. (1978). Principles of categorization. In E. Rosch & B. B. Lloyd (Ed.), Cognition and Categorization. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associa...

Beller, Bender, and Medin rehearse an often repeated statement (challenge 1a): “Cognitive science is not on the right track” because it “never took some of the crucial dimensions of cognition seriously.” Namely, “from the very beginning, they have excluded some fundamental dimensions of cognition from examination—affect, context, culture, and history [...]” (p. 345). To overcome this criticism,...

Previous researchers have discovered perplexing inconsistencies in how human subjects appear to utilize knowledge of category base rates when making category judgments. In particular, Medin and Edelson (1988) found an “inverse base rate effect” in which subjects tended to select a rare category when tested with a combination of conflicting cues, and Gluck and Bower (1988) reported apparent “bas...

Jerry Katz has observed that much of twentieth century philosophy of language turns on the Fregean thesis that sense determines reference. For example, he suggests that this thesis underwrites the widespread understanding of ‘analyticity’ (what he calls “the standard view”) as (necessary) truth in virtue of meaning alone. In addition, Katz argues that the Fregean thesis is a necessary premise i...

Two issues are at stake in this interchange. One concerns the relation between perceptual, conceptual and linguistic knowledge in early word learning. The other concerns the judicious treatment of evidence. Briefly stated, we designed our experiments (Booth & Waxman, 2002) with one clear goal: to document the pervasive role of conceptual information in naming. Three-year-old children in all con...