Abstract
This article presents two learning processes in order to explain how children at an early age can transform a complex sensory input to concepts and categories. The first process constructs the perceptual structures that emerge in children’s cognitive development by detecting invariants in the sensory input. The invariant structures involve a reduction in dimensionality of the sensory information. It is argued that this process generates the primary domains of space, objects and actions and that these domains can be represented as conceptual spaces. Once the primary domains have been established, the second process utilizes covariances between different dimensions of the domains in order to identify natural clusters of entities. The clusters are then are used to determine concepts as regions in the spaces. As an application, the processes are used to resolve the so-called ‘complex first paradox’ that emerges from the fact that children, in general, learn nouns earlier than adjectives, even though nouns are semantically more complex than adjectives.
Highlights
Conceptual SpacesA central idea of the conceptual spaces framework is that concepts can be represented geometrically (Gärdenfors 1990, 2000, 2014)
The main conclusion to be drawn from the preceding subsections is that the primary domains for space, objects and actions can be generated from the invariants that apply to each of the three domains
Even if the concepts defined on a domain are not universal, my analysis in section 3 suggests that at least the primary domains are universal in human cognition
Summary
A central idea of the conceptual spaces framework is that concepts can be represented geometrically (Gärdenfors 1990, 2000, 2014). Consider human perceptual colour space (see Figure 1). This space is three-dimensional, with one dimension – the vertical axis – standing for brightness, which goes from white to black through various shades of grey; the second dimension is the hue circle; and the third dimension is saturation, which is the intensity or depth of a colour. The primary function of the dimensions of a conceptual space is to represent various qualities of objects in different domains, where a domain represents a particular set of properties, for example colours. In particular the problem pertains to the domains of space, actions and object properties that form the basic ontology of our perceived world. My solution will be of the second type, I will argue that the organisation of the brain generates constraints on the learning processes
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