Categories

For instructions on how to access articles from certain journals (notably Psychological Review) from buffalo.edu machines,
link to: "Classic (Online) Readings in Cognitive Science"

1. From MITECS:
   1. Medin, Douglas L.; & Aguilar, Cynthia (2001), "Categorization".

   2. Hampton, James A. (2001), "Concepts".

2. Ontology and ontologies in AI

3. Miller, George A. (1956), "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information", Psychological Review 63(2) (March): 81-97.
   • One of the all-time classic papers in cognitive science.

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4. The Work of Eleanor Rosch & Colleagues:
   1. Rosch, Eleanor; & Mervis, Carolyn B. (1975), "Family Resemblances: Studies in the Internal Structure of Categories", Cognitive Psychology 7: 573-605.

   2. Rosch, Eleanor (1978), "Principles of Categorization", in Eleanor Rosch & Barbara B. Lloyd (eds.), Cognition and Categorization (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates): 27-48.

   3. Mervis, Carolyn B.; & Rosch, Eleanor (1981), "Categorization of Natural Objects", Annual Review of Psychology 32: 89-115.
      • An excellent survey article.

   4. 
      For a precursor, see:
      Brown, Roger (1958), "How Shall a Thing Be Called?", Psychological Review 65(1): 14–21.
      
   

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5. Lakoff, George (1987), Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
   • Why women, fire, and dangerous things can be classified together.

6. At UB:
   1. J. David Smith (PSY)
      • Smith, J.D.; & Minda, J.P. (2002), "Distinguishing prototype-based and exemplar-based processes in category learning", Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 28(4) (July): 800–811.
        The authors contrast exemplar-based and prototype-based processes in dot-pattern categorization. In Experiments 1A and 1B, participants provided similarity ratings of dot-distortion pairs that were distortions of the same originating prototype. The results show that comparisons to training exemplars surrounding the prototype create flat typicality gradients within a category and small prototype-enhancement effects, whereas comparisons to a prototype center create steep typicality gradients within a category and large prototype-enhancement effects. Thus, prototype and exemplar theories make different predictions regarding common versions of the dot-distortion task. Experiment 2 tested these different predictions by having participants learn dot-pattern categories. The steep typicality gradients, the large prototype effects, and the superior fit of prototype models suggest that participants refer to-be-categorized items to a representation near the category's center (the prototype), and not to the training exemplars that surround the prototype.

   2. David Zubin, Linguistics
      • Zubin, David A.; & Köpcke, Klaus-Michael (1986), "Gender and Folk Taxonomy: The Indexical Relation between Grammatical and Lexical Categorization", in Colette G. Craig (ed.), Noun Classes and Categorization: Proceedings of a Symposium on Categorization and Noun Classification (Eugene, OR; October 1983) (Philadelphia: John Benjamins): 139-180.

7. On Color Terms:
   • Berlin, Brent; & Kay, Paul (1969), Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

   • "Research on Colour Words"

8. Miscellaneous:
   • Douglas, Mary (1966), "The Abominations of Leviticus", in Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul): 41-57.
     • Discusses how the kosher dietary laws can be understood in terms of categories.