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14 - Formal models of categorization: insights from cognitive neuroscience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

By
Lukas Strnad ,
Stefano Anzellotti  and
Alfonso Caramazza
Edited by
Emmanuel M. Pothos  and
Andy J. Wills
Emmanuel M. Pothos
Affiliation:
Swansea University
Andy J. Wills
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
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Summary

Introduction

Category-specificity is a salient phenomenon in cognitive neuroscience. It has been reported in a wide variety of contexts and experimental paradigms. Much of the theoretically significant observations come from studies of patients with category-specific deficits and from imaging studies. Here, we will discuss how imaging and patient studies of category-specific phenomena can point to potential limitations of formal models of categorization, and inform their future development. We will point out that these models treat categorization in a domain-general manner. That is, categorization of all objects, irrespective of their domain, proceeds according to an identical mechanism. If the models are to encompass categorization of entities from the elementary categories that appear in neuropsychological studies, for example animals, tools, or conspecifics, without abandoning their domain-generality, a question arises as to how domain-specific phenomena can arise in conjunction with a completely domain-general mechanism of categorization. We will argue that an answer to this question is closely related to the theories of organization of conceptual knowledge that originally arose in the context of neuropsychology. These theories, in our opinion, constrain the possible accounts reconciling the domain-generality of formal models with the domain-specific phenomena known from neuropsychology.

The term ‘categorization’ denotes a set of cognitive mechanisms that involve different memory systems (Smith & Grossman, 2008) and vary as a function of the tasks performed and the strategy employed (Ashby & O'Brien, 2005).

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Formal Approaches in Categorization , pp. 313 - 324
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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