Originally published in 1978, the papers in this book derive from a 1976 meeting sponsored
by the Social Science Research Council to discuss the nature and principles of category …

We are forever trying to carve nature at its joints, dividing it into categories so that we can
make sense of the world. If we see a particular child pet a particular dog at a particular time …

We organisms are sensorimotor systems. Things in the world come into contact with our
sensory surfaces, and we interact with them based on what that sensorimotor contact …

Categorization, the basic cognitive process of arranging objects into categories, is a
fundamental process in human and machine intelligence and is central to investigations and …

A provisional model is presented in which categorical perception (CP) provides our basic or
elementary categories. In acquiring a category we learn to label or identify positive and …

Cognitive psychologists and cognitive anthropologists alike have been concerned with how
the human mind divides entities in the world into categories. Cognitive psychologists have …

The main contribution of anthropology to cognitive science over the past three decades has
been the development of a deeper understanding of the nature of symbolic representation. A …

A science-writer popularizing cognitive psychology in the NY Times Sunday Magazine
recently said," We human beings... are concept-making creatures: Unlike any other animal …

In this chapter, the author notes that the intuitive idea that we put things into categories
because we find them similar appears to be non-controversial, if not circular. Cars are …

f For humans facing a host of experiences in a complex world, an imponant l. activity is to
break up these experiences into meaningful, more manageable l components. This is the …