Concepts and Categories

COGS 558 Lecture 2

Concepts & Categories
• Concepts – units of thought
• Usually treated as mental representations of
• Individuals (or instances)
• Categories (generic collections, birds etc.)

• Importance of categorization
• Enables us to effortlessly lump instances into categories,
which enables further inferences
• Makes us smart
• Two basic kinds of categories

• The classical categories – Aristotelian

• Criticism of the classical perspective - Wittgenstein

Classical View
• Concepts are like definitions in the head
• All-or-none, rule-governed entities
• A list of properties common to all members of a
category (i.e. necessary conditions) and only to
those categories (i.e. sufficient conditions)

• Grandmother: mother of a parent

• Even number: an integer exactly divisible by 2
• Bachelor: an unmarried man
Wittgenstein’s Challenge
• I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in
common which makes us use the same word for all,-but
that they are related to one another in many different
ways.
• Consider for example the proceedings that we call
"games". I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games,
Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them
all? -- Don't say: "There must be something common,
or they would not be called 'games' "-but look and see
whether there is anything common to all. -- For if you
look at them you will not see something that is
common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a
whole series of them at that. To repeat: don't think, but
look! --
Reconsidering the category bachelor
• Definition: an adult human male who has never been married

• Charlie is 17 years old. He lives at home with his parents and is in high
school.
• Arthur has been living happily with Alice for the last 5 years. They have a
two year-old daughter and they have never officially been married
• Gerard needed a green card, so he arranged a fake marriage with his
friend Sue who is a US citizen. They have never lived together. He dates
a number of women and plans to have the marriage annuled as soon as
he finds someone he wants to marry.
• Faisal is allowed by the law of his native Abu Dhabi to marry 3 wives. He
currently has 2 and is interested in another potential fiancee.
• Francis I is the current Pope of the Roman Catholic Church
Şeref Bey married 5 times,
killed two of his former
wives, and still shamelessly
looking for his next wife
(victim) on a TV reality
Show called İzdivaç
Wittgenstein’s example
• Games
• Board games, card games, ball games, olympic games
• What are the necessary & sufficient conditions?
• Fun and amusing?
• OK for baseball, but what about chess
• Winners and loosers?
• Who would be the winner in a game where a boy throws a ball
towards a wall
• How about solitaire where you play solo
• Physical activity?
• Shared by baseball and a game where a boy throws a ball to
the wall
• Consider chairs
• Do they have to have legs?
• Do they have to have a back?
Wittgenstein – Family Resemblence
• And the result of this examination is: we see a
complicated network of similarities overlapping and
criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities.

• I can think of no better expression to characterize

these similarities than "family resemblances"; for
the various resemblances between members of a
family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait,
temperament, etc. etc. overlap and cris-cross in the
same way.-And I shall say: 'games' form a family

http://users.rcn.com/rathbone/lw65-69c.htm
• Members of a category may not share any common
features
• Instead, their attributes may form a complicated
network of overlapping features
• Members of a category exhibit a family
resemblance in this sense
• In Wittgenstein’s game example, its difficult to say
precisely where the concept of game begins and
ends
Properties of Family Resemblance
Categories
• Prototypes
• A hypothetical member who has the
largest number of traits that run
through the members of the category
• The average Joe, the mean instance
• Shortest distance to all other members
(remember similarity)
• e.g. prototypical bird – used in
dictionaries, not a real life bird but
captures most notions of birdiness
 A group of soldiers and
their composite
photograph

Exemplifies the
abstraction process

The process of including

recurring attributes and
excluding non-recurring
attributes

To abstract – to take
away from (Oxford
dictionnary)

https://collections.countway.harvard.edu/onview/items/show/6214
 Imagine you have the negatives
of all these photographs on top
of each other

Recurrent attributes of features

would stand out as dark features

This abstract set of features

would not belong to any one
person

i.e. prototype

Used by some as a metaphor for

family resemblance

https://collections.countway.harvard.edu/onview/items/show/6214
Properties of Family Resemblance
Categories
• Unclear Cases
• Is a sport-utility vehicle (SUV) a car or a
truck?
• Is tomato a vegatable?
• Examples from evolutionary biology
• Archaeopteryx (a dinosaur or a bird)
• Consider a blastocyst (a ball of cells that form
when an egg is fertilized with a sperm), an embryo,
a fetus.
• Are these cell assemblies or human beings?
• Is extracting the DNA from these an act of
murder or something like clipping a finger nail
• To what extent this is compatible with how people
use concepts?
• Motivated Rosch’s experiments on protoypes
 What is a concept?
• A concept is a mental representation that
picks out a set of entities
• Concepts refer
– What they refer to are categories

• Category membership is assumed to be not

arbitrary, but managed in a principled way
• What are these principles?
– A central question in cog sci
• Overview of research on concepts and
categories in the last 50 years
• Focus: the relation between concepts,
memory and meaning
• What sort of tasks or functions do we expect
concepts to perform?
– Categorization and Communication
 Functions of Concepts
• cognitive economy
– With concepts we divide the world into classes of
things to decrease the amount of information we
need to learn, perceive, remember, and recognize

• They permit us to make accurate predictions

• Categorization serves a communication

purpose
 Functions of Concepts
• Categorization
– Process by which mental representations
(concepts) determine whether some entity is a
member of a category

• Categorization -> understanding & prediction

– Classifying something as a category member
allows people to bring their knowledge of the
category to deal with a new instance
 Functions of Concepts
• We not only make sense of new entities, but also
modify and update our concepts, if needed
– Learning
• Relations between categories may support
inference
– Hierarchical relationships can support both deductive
and inductive inferences.
• Categories can be used to instantiate goals in
planning
 Functions of Concepts
• Communication
– People must have comparable concepts in mind to be
able to understand each other
• Concepts can be combined to create an unlimited
number of concepts
• What are the principles of conceptual
combination and how they relate to
communicational contexts?
– A fundamental research concern for cog sci,
linguistics, psycholinguistics etc.
 Minihistory of Research on Concepts
• The semantic memory marriage
– Does memory organization correspond to meaningful
relations between concepts?

• What can we tell about memory structure by

observing how people use concepts in
categorizing and reasoning?
– E.g. is there a mental pathway connecting ELBOW to
ARM to represent IS A PART OF relationship
– This turned out to be a problematic relationship
 Minihistory of Research on Concepts
• Influential research questions
– Are concepts learned by gradual increases in
associative strength, or is learning all or none?
– Which kinds of rules or concepts are easiest to learn?

• Most studies are conducted in the lab with

artificial categories
– Assumption: real world concepts are structured
according to the same kinds of arbitrary rules that
defined the artificial concepts
 Turning Point 1 - AI
• The AI influence (Quillian & Collins – 1967-69)
– Can a computer serve as a model for the structure
of human memory?
• Memory hierarchies – a network of concepts
• Principle of cognitive economy
– Properties true for all animals (eating, breathing)
are stored with the animal concept
– Properties distinctive to individual kinds (being
yellow) are stored at specific concepts
• A property does not have to be true for all subordinate
concepts to be stored in a superordinate
– E.g. birds generally fly, but this does not apply to Ostrich

• Membership can be computed

– Canary does not store the info that it is a kind of bird
– This can be computed/deduced by traversing the
hierarchical graph structure

• Yield testable predictions, based on distance between

properties and concepts
• Which of these inferences would be faster?
– a canary is yellow vs. a canary has feathers
– a canary can fly vs. a canary has skin
Turning Point 2 – Family Resemblance
• Concepts have a family resemblance structure
(Rosch)
– Category membership is determined by whether an
example has enough characteristic properties to
belong to that category

• Not all category members are equally “good”

examples of a concept
– Members that have more characteristic properties
should better exemplify that category
– e.g. canaries vs penguins for the bird category
Turning Point 2 – Family Resemblance
• People rate some examples (e.g. canary) more
typical than others (e.g. penguin)
• These judgments are highly correlated with the
number of characteristic features an example has
• Similar trends are observed in artificial categories
as well
• Correlational structure of features creates natural
chunks/clusters -> basic level categories
Basic level categories provide the best compromise between maximizing within
category similarity and minimizing between category similarity
Turning Point 2 – Family Resemblance
• Rosch et al found that basic level categories
are
– Preferred by adults while naming objects
– Learned first by children
– Associated with fastest categorization reaction
times
Superordinate level
Superordinate

Preferred level
Basic
BASIC LEVEL

Subordinate level
Subordinate
most general maximize accuracy
little predictive power

BASIC

maximize predictive power

most specific little accuracy
 Basic Level and Expertise

Dog and bird experts identifying dogs and birds at different levels
Experts make subordinate as quickly as basic categorizations
• How are these turning points related to each
other?
• How are these turning points related to each
other?
– Does the Quillian Collins model predict any
typicality effects observed by Rosch et al.?
– Does the Quillian Collins model say something
about basic-level categories?
 Summary
• How are these turning points related to each other?
– Does the Quillian/Collins model predict any typicality
effects observed by Rosch et al.?
– Does the Quillian/Collins model say something about
basic-level categories?
– Not quite so
• Conventional wisdom of 70s
– Memory groups concepts according to their similarity in
meaning, where similarity is imposed by correlated and
taxonomic structure
– Some doubts about semantics and memory relationship
 Memory Organization
• Lexical Decision Tasks
– Daisy vs raisy
• Lexical priming
– Participants respond faster to identify a string as a
word if it followed a semantically related item
– e.g. daisy followed by tulip, rather than steel
• Hypothesis: activation from one concept
spreads through memory to semantically
related concepts
 Memory Organization
• Sentence verification task
– A pigeon is a bird (T or F?) -> An X is a Y
• Typicality idea suggests the greater the
information overlap between X and Y
– the faster the time to confirm a true statement,
– the slower the time to disconfirm a false statement
• Avoids claims about memory organization
– If memory is organized on a semantic basis, then there
should be activation between semantically related
words even in the absence of other sorts of
associations
 Semantics
• Semantics is not just about meaning of words,
but also larger units (phrases, sentences)
• At what level Quillian’s hierarchical model
operates?
• How would you characterize meaning in
Quillian’s approach?
 Semantics
• Semantics is not just about meaning of words,
but also larger units (phrases, sentences)
• At what level Quillian’s hierarchical model
operates?
– Single word level
• How would you characterize meaning in Quillian’s
approach?
– It is the relative position of a word in the semantic
network
• How can one extend this to the level of
phrases/sentences?
• Memory pathways?
– May work for sentences like “a rose is a flower”
– There is a preexisting memory pathway linking rose as
a subordinate of flower

• How about novel sentences?

– Ayse placed a daisy in between her book
– If word meaning is a position in a network, it is
difficult to see how these positions can be combined
to produce sentence meanings
– Sentence meanings cannot be a single node in this
framework either, why?
– How do we deal with interpreting word composition?
• One approach
– Add more pathways connecting memory nodes
– Ayse, book, daisy should be interconnected
• Do you see any problems in this approach?
• One approach
– Add more pathways connecting memory nodes
– Ayse, book, daisy should be interconnected
• Do you see any problems in this approach?
– Adding new connections changes the overall network
structure
– As you reach meaning at the sentence level, you alter
the meanings at the word level!
– Remember that meaning is relative position in the
semantic network in Quillian et al.’s approach
 Summary
• Experimental research on concepts and
categories was largely unable to confirm that
global memory organization conferred word
meaning
• Neither global theories nor exemplar theories
could describe how we can understand novel
sentences
• Semantic memory theory could neither
describe semantics nor memory
Prototype vs Exemplar Models
 Prototype vs Exemplar Models
• Prototype Model
– People learn characteristic features of categories and use
them to represent the category (Posner & Keele, 1970)
– Categorization depends on similarity to the prototypes

• Exemplar Model
– No abstraction like a prototype
– New examples are classified by assessing their similarity to
stored examples
– An unfamiliar bird like heron may be correctly classified as
a bird, not because it is similar to a bird prototype, but
rather because it is similar to flamingos, storks, and other
shore birds.
prototype
 Prototypes and Multidimensional
Spaces
• A Concept is represented by a prototypical
item = central tendency (e.g. location P below)

A new instance
is classified
based on its
similarity to the
prototype
Is this a “chair”? Is this a “cat”?

Is this a “dog”?
 Typicality Effects
• typical
– is robin a bird?
– is dog a mammal?
– is diamond a precious stone?

• atypical
– is ostrich a bird? slower verification times
for atypical items
– is a whale a mammal?
– is turquoise a precious stone?
 Graded Structure
• Typical items are similar to a prototype
• Typicality effects are naturally predicted
atypical

typical
 Classification of Prototype
• Prototype are often easy to classify and remember
even if the prototype is never seen during learning

Prototype Small Medium Large

Distortion Distortion Distortion
Posner & Keele (1970) Demo

From Mark Stevyer’s PSYCH 140C lecture notes

http://psiexp.ss.uci.edu/research/teachingP140C/
 Prototype

Low Distortions

High Distortions

Random Patterns
Dot patterns over a
30 by 30 grid
• will see dot patterns

• judge whether each belongs to category A or

category B

• guess at first, but will get better with feedback

That was Category B.
That was Category A.
That was Category A.
That was Category B.
That was Category B.
That was Category A.
That was Category A.
That was Category B.
That was Category A.
That was Category B.
Now, judge whether or not you have seen
the following dot pattern.
Old or New
1
Old or New
2
Old or New
3
Old or New
4
Old or New
5
Old or New
6
Old or New
7
Old or New
8
Old or New
9
Old or New
10
 Category A members

6th stimulus

PROTOTYPE-A
 Category B members

9th stimulus

PROTOTYPE-B
 100
90
80
70
called OLD

60
50
40
30
20
10
0
old proto low high

pattern type
 Findings
• Correct classification of new patterns
decreased as distortion increased
– Typicality effect
• 1 week delay differentially affected
categorization of prototypic versus old training
patterns
– Memory for the specific examples fades more
rapidly than memory for the prototypes
 Problem with Prototype Models
• All information about individual exemplars is
lost
– category size
– variability of the exemplars
– correlations among attributes
• (e.g., only small birds sing)
 Exemplar Representations
• Category representation consists of storage of a number of
category members
• New exemplars are compared to known exemplars – most
similar item will influence the classification the most

dog

dog ?? cat

dog
cat

dog cat
 Exemplar Models
• Model can explain
– Prototype classification effects
• Prototype is similar to most exemplars from a category
– Graded typicality
• How many exemplars is the new item similar to?
– Effects of variability

• Overall, compared to prototype models, exemplar

models better explain data from categorization
experiments (Storms et al., 2000)
 Prototype vs Exemplar Models
• Medin & Schaffer’s study
– Number of typical features vs high similarity to particular
training examples
– Categorization was more strongly influenced by examples

• A prototype representation captures what is on

average true of a category, but is insensitive to within-
category feature distributions

• Exemplar model predict some of the effects supporting

prototype theory
– E.g. differential forgetting of prototypes vs examples
 Schemata
• So far we have been talking about individual
concepts, but concepts are grounded in (visual)
contexts.

• Schemas are large, complex units of knowledge

that encode properties which are typical of
instances of general categories and omit
properties which are not typical of the categories

• Useful for encoding regularities in categories –

express what category members have in common
 Remembering Objects from a Graduate Office

chair
desk
skull

books

(30% of subjects falsely

remember books)

Brewer & Treyens (1981)

 Representing Schemas
One way to represent schemas is with a slot-filler structure, where
slots are attributes that are filled in with values that category
members of the category typically have on various attributes.

Office Schema

Contains: books, computer, shelves, desk

Function: serves as work space
Shape: rectilinear
Size: 80-200 square feet
Part of: building

Building Schema

Parts: roof, walls

Location: ground
 Multimodal theories of Category
Knowledge
• Perceptual symbols theory (Barsalou, 1999)
• Concepts are represented by perceptual symbols
• Perceptual symbols are records of the neural states
that underlie perception
• A representation is a simulation of experience
– i.e. sensorimotor simulations underlie the representation
of concepts
 Prediction of Perceptual Symbol
Theory
• Should find a modality switch effect for concepts
• Verifying a property in the auditory modality (e.g.,
BLENDER-loud) should be slower after verifying a
property in a different modality (e.g., CRANBERRIES-
tart) than after verifying a property in the same
modality (e.g., LEAVES-rustling)

• Property verification with modality specific properties

(banana-yellow, marble-cool)

• Six modalities: vision, sound, touch, taste, smell, motor

Pecher, Zeelenberg, & Barsalou, 2003

 Experiment: Modality switch
Property verification task

BLENDER
Same modality condition: LOUD
LEAVES
RUSTLING

MARBLE
Different modality condition: COOL

BANANA
YELLOW

Pecher, Zeelenberg, & Barsalou, 2003

 Results of Experiment

1250

1200

same modality
RT

1150
different modality

1100

1050
exp1 exp2, 0 ms exp2, 260 ms
SOA SOA

Exp 1: sentence presentation

Exp 2: word pair presentation

Pecher, Zeelenberg, & Barsalou, 2003

 Neural Evidence for Multimodal
Mechanisms
• Researchers found that when participants viewed
manipulable objects such as hammers, a circuit in
the brain that underlies the grasping of manipulable
objects became active.

• This circuit did not become active when buildings,

animals, or faces were observed.
(Chao & Martin, 2000)
 Discourse & Concept Generation
• How do we create new concepts?
• How are concepts grounded in social
interaction and practice?
– Sociology of Science
– Discursive Psychology
Discovery of the “Optical Pulsar”

(Garfinkel, Lynch & Livingstone, 1981)

Published Version in Nature
 Optical Pulsar Case Study
• “Could that be it?” “That must be it!”
• What do “it” or “that” refer to?
• Conceptual meaning making
– Interactional organization, pragmatic processes
– Perhaps not all relevant processes are located
inside the head
 Next Week
• We will continue with Deductive & Inductive
Reasoning
• Download Open Sesame, Mouse Tracker and
watch the tutorial videos
• Start to think about your term project topics
 Methodology Demo
• Example connectionist model of semantic
memory called Interactive Activation and
Competition (Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986)
• Based on a cognitive modeling paradigm
including artificial neural nets
• Has various desirable features identified from
experimental work
• Exemplifies the use of models for generating
mechanistic explanations of cognitive
phenomena such as categorization etc.
Jets-Sharks Example
Jets-Sharks Example
 View in a Conventional Information
Storage System
Address Contents

Gang Age Education Marital Occupation

Status
Alan Jets 30s JH Married Burglar
Art Jets 40s JH Single Pusher
Clyde Jets 40s JH Single Bookie
Dave Sharks 30s HS Divorced Pusher
Don Sharks 30s Col Married Burglar

Address + contents
Efficient for queries using the address
Is Don a Burglar? Does <address> contain <attribute>
As long as there is a single match to the address, the contents can be fetched
 View in a Conventional Information
Storage System
Address Contents

Gang Age Education Marital Occupation

Status
Alan Jets 30s JH Married Burglar
Art Jets 40s JH Single Pusher
Clyde Jets 40s JH Single Bookie
Dave Sharks 30s HS Divorced Pusher
Don Sharks 30s Col Married Burglar

Queries such as “Do you know the name of a Burglar?” is trickier in this format
Requires some search mechanism to check contents of the records
 View in a Conventional Information
Storage System
Address Contents

Gang Age Education Marital Occupation Grandma

Status
Alan Jets 30s JH Married Burglar -
Art Jets 40s JH Single Pusher London
Clyde Jets 40s JH Single Bookie -
Dave Sharks 30s HS Divorced Pusher -
Don Sharks 30s Col Married Burglar -

How about sparse columns, that record cues unique to one or two records?
A random search process may take longer time to find such instances
Memory experiments do not suggest such latencies in retrieval
Benefits of IAC as a Memory Model
• Content addressable memory
– Do you know the name of a pusher?

• Allows generalizations
– Jets are younger than Sharks
– When you trigger activity in 20s, more Jets members will be active, gradually
making the Jets active
– as it reaches the threshold the network will respond Jets to a question which
gang has younger members

• Typicality effects/exemplar cases

– When you activate pusher the net will more likely to respond with Fred or Nick
then Oliver
• Pushers are more likely to be Jets, in their 30s, HS graduates, single
• Fred has the most similar profile to the prototypical pusher
– When you are asked to name birds you don’t say chicken but mention serce,
guvercin etc. more typical exemplars
 IAC Model
• You are welcome to play with this model!
• Alternative 1
– If you have Matlab, get the Matlab version from the
Stanford PDP Lab
• https://web.stanford.edu/group/pdplab/resources.html
• Alternative 2
– Use the implementation in SimBrain (load the preset
IAC model)
– http://www.simbrain.net/
– Also check this demo by the SimBrain team
– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nw3TEDfugLs