Category Coherence Research Articles

Does Stimulus Category Coherence Influence Visual Working Memory? A Rational Analysis.

Visual working memory (VWM) refers to the temporary storage and manipulation of visual information. Although visually different, objects we view and remember can share the same higher-level category information, such as an apple, orange, and banana all being classified as fruit. We study the influence of category information on VWM, focusing on the question of whether stimulus category coherence (i.e., whether all to-be-remembered items belong to the same semantic category) influences VWM performance. This question is addressed in two behavioral experiments using a change-detection paradigm and a rational analysis using an ideal observer based on a Bayesian model. Both experimental participants and the ideal observer often, but not always, performed numerically better on coherent trials (i.e., when all stimuli belonged to the same category). We hypothesize that the influence of category coherence information on VWM may be task-dependent and/or stimulus-dependent. In conditions when category coherence information is highly valuable for task performance, as indicated by the ideal observer, then participants tended to make use of it. However, when the ideal observer suggested this information was not crucial to performance, participants did not. In addition, both participants and the ideal observer showed a bias toward responding "same," and often showed a stronger influence of category coherence on change trials. The consistencies between participant and ideal observer responses suggest participants often behaved as they did because these behaviors are optimal (or approximately so) for maximizing task performance. This may help explain conflicting results reported in the scientificliterature.

The Double-Edged Sword of Exemplar Similarity

We investigate how a firm’s positioning relative to category exemplars shapes security analysts’ evaluations. Using a two-stage model of evaluation (initial screening and subsequent assessment), we propose that exemplar similarity enhances a firm’s recognizability and legitimacy, increasing the likelihood that it passes the initial screening stage and attracts analyst coverage. However, exemplar similarity may also prompt unfavorable comparisons with exemplar firms, leading to lower analyst recommendations in the assessment stage. We further argue that category coherence, distinctiveness, and exemplar typicality influence the impact of exemplar similarity on firm evaluation. Leveraging natural language processing (NLP) techniques to analyze a sample of 7,603 U.S. public firms from 1997 to 2022, we find robust support for our predictions. By highlighting the intricate role of strategic positioning vis-à-vis category exemplars in shaping audience evaluations, our findings have important implications for research on positioning relative to category exemplars, category viability, optimal distinctiveness, and security analysts. Supplemental Material: The online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.16855 .

New Frontiers in Categories Research: The Role of Social Practice, Context, and Materiality

Research interests in categories and categorization has grown significantly in recent years, but only in recent years have researchers begun to pay closer attention to social context and social process, and particularly to the social practices through which categories, in particularly categories of innovative products, or new phenomena are enacted and made concrete. The current symposium takes on this challenge by addressing several questions at the frontier of categories research: (1) how do categories interact with core organizational processes and how does the meaning of categories interacts with other organization constructs such as routines, identity, and structure through organizational practices, (2) how are categories anchored in market, professional practices or embodied in cultural and material practices, (3) how are categories instantiated in communicative practices and discourse, (4) how are organizational actors and their actions constraint by categories and how may these actors escape or decouple from the reach of categories and categorization. Category Dimensions and Category Coherence Presenter: Stine Grodal; Northeastern U. Presenter: Miyoung Chang; Boston U. Questrom School of Business What does contact tracing really mean? How governments and citizens contest the meaning of contact t Presenter: Semi Min; New York U. The Interplay of Language, Materiality, and Practices in the Creation of the Plant-based Meat Catego Presenter: Eunice Yunjin Rhee; Seattle U. An Inhabited View of Categorization Presenter: Enlan Wang; U. of Southern California Presenter: Peer Fiss; U. of Southern California

Effect of Interaction between the Base-rate and Category Coherence on Property Generalization

Effect of Interaction between the Base-rate and Category Coherence on Property Generalization

Identifying the causes of road traffic collisions: Using police officers’ expertise to improve the reporting of contributory factors data

Worldwide, road crashes are a major course of death and serious injury. Police reports provide a rich source of data on the proximal causes (e.g., impairment by alcohol, failure to look properly) of road traffic collisions. Yet, road safety research has raised concerns about the quality and reliability of police reported data. In the UK crash report form, contributory factors are categorised (e.g., vehicle defects, driver error or reaction) to aid police officers in identifying appropriate factors. However, discord between the classification of contributory factors in crash reports and police officers’ own categorical perceptions may lead to misunderstanding, and in turn, misreporting of contributory factors. The current investigation recruited 162 police officers to report their perceptions of the relations among contributory factors in the UK crash report form. Hierarchical clustering analysis was used to identify an optimal category structure based on police officers’ perceptions. The clustering analysis identified a classification system with seven or eleven categories of contributory factors, maximising the internal coherence of categories and minimising discord with police officers’ perceptions. The findings also yield new insights into police officers’ perceptions of crash causation and demonstrate how statistical techniques can be used to inform the design of road traffic collision report forms.

Novel Labels Increase Category Coherence, But Only When People Have the Goal to Coordinate.

From infancy, we recognize that labels denote category membership and help us to identify the critical features that objects within a category share. Labels not only reflect how we categorize, but also allow us to communicate and share categories with others. Given the special status of labels as markers of category membership, do novel labels (i.e., non-words) affect the way in which adults select dimensions for categorization in unsupervised settings? Additionally, is the purpose of this effect primarily coordinative (i.e., do labels promote shared understanding of how we categorize objects)? To address this, we conducted two experiments in which participants individually categorized images of mountains with or without novel labels, and with or without a goal of coordination, within a non-communicative paradigm. People who sorted items with novel labels had more similar categories than people who sorted without labels only when they were told that their categories should make sense to other people, and not otherwise. We argue that sorters' goals determine whether novel labels promote the development of socially coherent categories.

A mathematical theory of semantic development in deep neural networks

An extensive body of empirical research has revealed remarkable regularities in the acquisition, organization, deployment, and neural representation of human semantic knowledge, thereby raising a fundamental conceptual question: What are the theoretical principles governing the ability of neural networks to acquire, organize, and deploy abstract knowledge by integrating across many individual experiences? We address this question by mathematically analyzing the nonlinear dynamics of learning in deep linear networks. We find exact solutions to this learning dynamics that yield a conceptual explanation for the prevalence of many disparate phenomena in semantic cognition, including the hierarchical differentiation of concepts through rapid developmental transitions, the ubiquity of semantic illusions between such transitions, the emergence of item typicality and category coherence as factors controlling the speed of semantic processing, changing patterns of inductive projection over development, and the conservation of semantic similarity in neural representations across species. Thus, surprisingly, our simple neural model qualitatively recapitulates many diverse regularities underlying semantic development, while providing analytic insight into how the statistical structure of an environment can interact with nonlinear deep-learning dynamics to give rise to these regularities.

How to prove decidability of equational theories with second-order computation analyser SOL

Abstract We present a general methodology of proving the decidability of equational theory of programming language concepts in the framework of second-order algebraic theories. We propose a Haskell-based analysis tool, i.e. Second-Order Laboratory, which assists the proofs of confluence and strong normalisation of computation rules derived from second-order algebraic theories. To cover various examples in programming language theory, we combine and extend both syntactical and semantical results of the second-order computation in a non-trivial manner. We demonstrate how to prove decidability of various algebraic theories in the literature. It includes the equational theories of monad and λ-calculi, Plotkin and Power’s theory of states and bits, and Stark’s theory of π-calculus. We also demonstrate how this methodology can solve the coherence of monoidal categories.

Collaboration facilitates abstract category learning.

We examined the effects of collaboration (dyads vs. individuals) and category structure (coherent vs. incoherent) on learning and transfer. Working in dyads or individually, participants classified examples from either an abstract coherent category, the features of which are not fixed but relate in a meaningful way, or an incoherent category, the features of which do not relate meaningfully. All participants were then tested individually. We hypothesized that dyads would benefit more from classifying the coherent category structure because past work has shown that collaboration is more beneficial for tasks that build on shared prior knowledge and provide opportunities for explanation and abstraction. Results showed that dyads improved more than individuals during the classification task regardless of category coherence, but learning in a dyad improved inference-test performance only for participants who learned coherent categories. Although participants in the coherent categories performed better on a transfer test, there was no effect of collaboration.

Coherence for monoidal G-categories and braided G-crossed categories

We prove a coherence theorem for actions of groups on monoidal categories. As an application we prove coherence for arbitrary braided G-crossed categories.

Higher Education Institutions in the United States: Commitment and coherency to sustainability vis-à-vis dimensions of the institutional environment

This work proposes a cohesive approach to assess the degree of commitment and institutional coherence of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in the United States to address the challenges posed by sustainability. Taking into account the Administrative, Social & Cultural, Academic and Operational dimensions of their institutional environment, the conceptual framework proposes an assemblage of indices to measure the commitment, parity and institutional coherence of selected institutions to a set of sustainability actions conceived to reflect internationally established concepts and recommendations understood as the essentials of sustainability. A scrutiny of specific prominent metrics used to evaluate sustainability performance constituted the basic criteria to select the assessed institutions. Although the degree of commitment of these HEIs was ranked as High, the results reveal a concerning lack of adherence in their implementation of social and cultural activities aligned with the sustainability actions proposed. Also, a significant dissimilarity is identified in the degree of coherence for different categories of the stratified analysis. Addressing the environmental impacts that emerge from the ordinary operation of these institutions, the study also discusses the concerning level of consumption of water and energy, GHG emissions and waste generation.

Influence of category coherence and type of base-rate acquisition on property generalization

Category coherence involves identifying similarities between social categories, such as jobs and hobbies, and is primarily used for generalizing or drawing inferences about their properties. Category coherence is also used for drawing inferences from explicit information, such as base rates. For example, people generalize the properties of groups or brands from multiple sources (e.g., survey results and the share market in periodicals). However, generalizing the properties of categories using explicit base-rate information may not always involve category coherence; rather, it may involve directly analyzing base-rate information. Therefore, this study attempts to distinguish between conditions in which people use category coherence and explicit base-rate information. Specifically, we proposed that people acquiring explicit base-rate knowledge—described as a percentage—would generalize a category's properties according to its base rate; however, for base-rate information acquired via direct observation, the inductive strength in generalizing properties would be greater for categories with high levels of coherence. Our results (Experiment 1 and Experiment 2) validated these two predictions. Finally, the interaction between category coherence and type of base-rate acquisition was discussed.

Category coherence in children's inductive inferences with cross-classified entities

Items rarely belong to a single category, but rather can be cross-classified into many categories, each serving a very different basis for induction. Presently, little is known about how children determine which category to use for induction in cross-classification situations. This research examined the role of category coherence in children's and adults’ (N=329) inductive reasoning about cross-classified entities. In Study 1 and 2, participants were presented with a person who could be cross-classified into two categories, one coherent and the other incoherent. Category coherence is the extent to which members of a category and/or the properties of a category make sense together, given one's background knowledge. The results showed that by age 5 years, children are systematic in their use of coherence, tending to select the coherent category to inform their inference about the person. There is weaker evidence for 4-year-olds. Study 3 and 4 revealed that 4-year-olds have an appreciation for coherence in tasks of categorization. The results of Study 5 demonstrated 5-year-olds’ and adults’ tendency to use coherence when reasoning about cross-classified entities across different induction tasks. Overall, these results contribute to our emerging understanding of how and why children select some categories versus others during induction with cross-classified items.

The semantics of "at"

The cognitive semantic research into spatial prepositions has focused on their polysemous nature and the coherence of cognitive categories they constitute. At thesame time, the question of their categorical status has not yet been resolved causing disagreement about their membership in the content or function word group. The presentcorpus-based study investigates the semantic structure of the English spatial preposition at regarded as a typically English preposition not present in other languages. The investigation attempts to establish the primary sense of the preposition and to find motivating principles behind the individual senses. For the purpose of the study, 2168 linguistic items extracted from the British National Corpus and containing the preposition were analyzed yielding 18 distinct senses and one group of miscellaneous expressions. The research suggests that the semantic structure of the preposition at is best seen as a semantic network with the primary sense functioning as a prototype and other related senses as more peripheral extensions. The research reveals that the polysemy of the preposition at is relatively extensive and that the word at does not belong to morphological categories other than the prepositional one.

Quantifying heterogeneity attributable to polythetic diagnostic criteria: theoretical framework and empirical application.

Heterogeneity within psychiatric disorders is both theoretically and practically problematic: For many disorders, it is possible for 2 individuals to share very few or even no symptoms in common yet share the same diagnosis. Polythetic diagnostic criteria have long been recognized to contribute to this heterogeneity, yet no unified theoretical understanding of the coherence of symptom criteria sets currently exists. A general framework for analyzing the logical and mathematical structure, coherence, and diversity of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual diagnostic categories (DSM-5 and DSM-IV-TR) is proposed, drawing from combinatorial mathematics, set theory, and information theory. Theoretical application of this framework to 18 diagnostic categories indicates that in most categories, 2 individuals with the same diagnosis may share no symptoms in common, and that any 2 theoretically possible symptom combinations will share on average less than half their symptoms. Application of this framework to 2 large empirical datasets indicates that patients who meet symptom criteria for major depressive disorder and posttraumatic stress disorder tend to share approximately three-fifths of symptoms in common. For both disorders in each of the datasets, pairs of individuals who shared no common symptoms were observed. Any 2 individuals with either diagnosis were unlikely to exhibit identical symptomatology. The theoretical and empirical results stemming from this approach have substantive implications for etiological research into, and measurement of, psychiatric disorders.

Generic language use reveals domain differences in young children's expectations about animal and artifact categories

The goal of the present study was to explore domain differences in young children's expectations about the structure of animal and artifact categories. We examined 5-year-olds’ and adults’ use of category-referring generic noun phrases (e.g., “Birds fly”) about novel animals and artifacts. The same stimuli served as both animals and artifacts; thus, stimuli were perceptually identical across domains, and domain was indicated exclusively by language. Results revealed systematic domain differences: children and adults produced more generic utterances when items were described as animals than artifacts. Because the stimuli were novel and lacking perceptual cues to domain, these findings must be attributed to higher-order expectations about animal and artifact categories. Overall, results indicate that by age 5, children are able to make knowledge-based domain distinctions between animals and artifacts that may be rooted in beliefs about the coherence and homogeneity of categories within these domains.

Building look & feel concept models from color combinations

In this paper, we tackle the problem of associating combinations of colors to abstract concepts (e.g. capricious, classic, cool, delicate, etc.). Since such concepts are difficult to represent using single colors, we consider combinations of colors or color palettes. We leverage two novel databases for color palettes, and learn categorization models using both low and high level descriptors. It is shown that the Bag of Colors and Fisher Vectors are the most rewarding descriptors for palettes categorization and retrieval. A simple but novel and efficient method for cleaning weakly annotated data, whilst preserving the visual coherence of categories is also given. Finally, we demonstrate that abstract category models learned on color palettes can be used in different applications such as image personalization, concept-based palette, and image retrieval and color transfer.

Form-Giving and the Remains of Identity in A Gesture Life

This essay examines how the Asian American novel anchors its epistemological project on figures of identity that authorize its historicist claims. I argue that Chang-rae Lee's novel A Gesture Life relies on the remains of identitarian thinking even as it dismantles the coherence of identity categories. These assumptions become legible as Lee displaces the realist framework of the novel by depicting multiple temporalities and relying on racialized and gendered figures that exceed the time of history. I end by considering how A Gesture Life reveals the theoretical and political conundrums of Asian American literary culture after the critique of essentialism.

STANDING OUT: CATEGORY CONTRAST AND COHERENCE IN THE HONG KONG FILM INDUSTRY, 1975–1997

Belonging to a contrasting market category provides legitimacy spillovers and improves the appeal of a producer. Besides improving the average performance of its members, contrast allows disentangling their differential quality, ultimately increasing the variance of their performance. These effects should hold especially true for specialist organizations “C i.e., fully dedicated members of a category. Nonetheless, the disciplinary mechanism of contrast is challenged by the existence of partial membership and of diffused straddling among the members of a category. Which alternative disciplinary mechanism may be at work in such cases? Here we propose that category coherence “C i.e., the recombination of coherent categories among the members of a category “C is a possible answer to this question. The effects of category coherence are advanced with respect to the mean and the variance of the performance of category members and its consequences postulated to be stronger with increasing number of prior violations. The mechanisms of contrast and coherence are juxtaposed in the context of the Hong Kong film industry during the period 1975–1997.

Predictors of ingroup projection: The roles of superordinate category coherence and complexity

Based on an integration of research on ingroup projection, self-anchoring and social identification, three experiments investigated whether projection of ingroup characteristics to a superordinate category would be moderated by both the perceived complexity (number of defining prototypes) and coherence (structural clarity, organization) of the superordinate category. We predicted that ingroup projection would be prevented by the presence of either a complex or coherent superordinate representation. However, we also predicted that complexity would reduce ingroup projection at the expense of superordinate category identification, while coherence would not. We observed the predicted interaction between superordinate category complexity and coherence in three studies: a complex or coherent superordinate category led to lower levels of projection. However, only complexity of the superordinate category reduced superordinate group identification. These findings clarify and refine our understanding of the conditions under which ingroup projection can be discouraged, and the cognitive mechanisms involved.