Concepts and Categorization

Abstract

Abstract Whenever people think of an object as something (e.g. that Fido is a dog, a pet, or loyal), they are categorizing it using their internal concepts. A concept is a mental representation that allows different things to be treated equivalently for some purpose. People learn concepts to facilitate communication, to make useful predictions about their world, to create mental building blocks for expressing more sophisticated thoughts, and to form efficient representations for objects and situations. We discuss five approaches to how concepts are learned and represented: rules, prototypes, exemplars, category boundaries, and theories. Whereas some of these approaches leave the impression that concepts are isolated mental structures, connections between concepts are also critically important. We discuss connections between concepts and perception that link categorization to object recognition and serve to ground concepts in the world. Consistent with this connection, concepts and perceptual processes mutually influence one another. We also describe connections between concepts and language that allow concepts to subserve abstract communication, and for language needs to reciprocally affect concepts. Finally, we predict future directions for concept learning research, including formal computational modeling and educational applications.