ERIC Number: EJ757319
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2007-May
Pages: 18
Abstractor: Author
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0749-596X
EISSN: N/A
Beyond Exemplars and Prototypes as Memory Representations of Natural Concepts: A Clustering Approach
Verbeemen, Timothy; Vanpaemel, Wolf; Pattyn, Sven; Storms, Gert; Verguts, Tom
Journal of Memory and Language, v56 n4 p537-554 May 2007
Categorization in well-known natural concepts is studied using a special version of the Varying Abstraction Framework (Vanpaemel, W., & Storms, G. (2006). A varying abstraction framework for categorization. Manuscript submitted for publication; Vanpaemel, W., Storms, G., & Ons, B. (2005). A varying abstraction model for categorization. In B. Bara, L. Barsalou, & M. Bucciarelli (Eds.), Proceedings of the 27th annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2277-2282). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum). This framework assumes a continuum between highly abstract memory representations (prototypes) and highly detailed representations of concept members (exemplars). Comparison stimuli for categorization are obtained by taking for each category the centroids of a set of clusters, produced by K-means clustering, effectively producing the Generalized Context Model (GCM; Nosofsky, R. M. (1986) Attention, similarity, and the identification-categorization relationship. "Journal of Experimental Psychology: General." 115, 39-57) and the Single-Prototype Model as extreme cases. The clustering version of the Varying Abstraction Framework was fit on a set of novel, to-be-classified fruits and vegetables (Smits, Storms, Rosseel, & De Boeck, 2002) and on a new set of novel, to-be-classified carnivores and herbivores. Better fit values were clearly obtained for a model based on intermediately abstract representations, indicating a strategy where people compare the novel stimuli to a set of multiple prototypes. This sheds a new light on the prototype versus exemplar discussion that has dominated the literature over the past 25 years.
Descriptors: Memory, Classification, Concept Formation, Multivariate Analysis, Models, Abstract Reasoning, Learning Strategies
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A