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Creating Objects and Object Categories for Studying Perception and Perceptual Learning
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Creating Objects and Object Categories for Studying Perception and Perceptual Learning

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Categorical perception.

Robert L Goldstone1, Andrew T Hendrickson1

  • 1Department of Psychology and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, 47405, USA.

Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews. Cognitive Science
|August 15, 2015
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Categorical perception (CP) influences how we perceive stimuli. Observers better discriminate between items from different categories, showing perception adapts to categorization needs.

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Science
  • Psychology
  • Neuroscience

Background:

  • Categorical perception (CP) describes how observer categories influence perception.
  • CP is demonstrated by enhanced discrimination between items of different categories versus the same category, controlling for physical differences.

Purpose of the Study:

  • Investigate the origins of CP: innate vs. learned categories.
  • Determine the timing of category influence in information processing.
  • Explore the relationship between linguistic processing and CP.

Main Methods:

  • Survey of CP research across speech and visual domains.
  • Review of computational and mathematical models of CP.

Main Results:

  • CP warps sensory signals non-linearly, converting analog input to quasi-digital encodings.
  • Perception is adapted to support necessary categorizations.

Conclusions:

  • CP is a fundamental cognitive adaptation.
  • Understanding CP is crucial for cognitive science and understanding perception-categorization interactions.