Jove
Visualize
Contact Us
JoVE
x logofacebook logolinkedin logoyoutube logo
ABOUT JoVE
OverviewLeadershipBlogJoVE Help Center
AUTHORS
Publishing ProcessEditorial BoardScope & PoliciesPeer ReviewFAQSubmit
LIBRARIANS
TestimonialsSubscriptionsAccessResourcesLibrary Advisory BoardFAQ
RESEARCH
JoVE JournalMethods CollectionsJoVE Encyclopedia of ExperimentsArchive
EDUCATION
JoVE CoreJoVE BusinessJoVE Science EducationJoVE Lab ManualFaculty Resource CenterFaculty Site
Terms & Conditions of Use
Privacy Policy
Policies

Related Experiment Videos

Basing categorization on individuals and events

L W Barsalou1, J Huttenlocher, K Lamberts

  • 1Department of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA. barsalou@emory.edu

Cognitive Psychology
|September 8, 1998
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Related Concept Videos

You might also read

Related Articles

Articles linked to this work by shared authors, journal, and citation graph.

Sort by
Same author

Common variant at 16p11.2 conferring risk of psychosis.

Molecular psychiatry·2012
Same author

Toddlers' use of metric information and landmarks to reorient.

Journal of experimental child psychology·2001
Same author

Representing properties locally.

Cognitive psychology·2001
Same author

Perceptual symbol systems.

The Behavioral and brain sciences·2001
Same author

Category effects on estimates of stimuli: perception or reconstruction?

Psychological science·2001
Same author

What do infants know about continuous quantity?

Journal of experimental child psychology·2000
Same journal

Sublexical semantic decoding during incidental novel word learning in natural Chinese reading.

Cognitive psychology·2026
Same journal

Seeing, hearing, and feeling causation.

Cognitive psychology·2026
Same journal

Separating decision and motor contributions to behavioral biases induced by manipulating stimulus probability.

Cognitive psychology·2026
Same journal

Congruency drives "conflict adaptation" independent of conflict: Converging evidence from behavior and computational modeling.

Cognitive psychology·2026
Same journal

Corrigendum to "Network analyses identify critical factors for facilitating future-oriented decision-making" [Cogn. Psychol. 165 (2026) 101815].

Cognitive psychology·2026
Same journal

The time course of local coherence effects in German: Evidence from self-paced reading times and event-related potentials.

Cognitive psychology·2026
See all related articles

Human categorization involves tracking individuals across events, not just statistical learning. This suggests the brain builds internal world models, representing individuals over time for better categorization.

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Neuroscience
  • Computational Modeling

Background:

  • Traditional models of categorization (exemplar, prototype, connectionist) treat events as independent learning units.
  • These models imply that learning from events involving the same individual is isolated, not integrated into a cohesive representation.
  • This contrasts with the human ability to recognize and utilize information about individuals across multiple experiences.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether human categorization relies on tracking individuals across events.
  • To determine if representations of individuals are formed and used during categorization.
  • To test the 'representationalism' hypothesis against purely statistical event-based learning models.

Main Methods:

  • A series of experiments were conducted with human subjects.

Related Experiment Videos

  • Participants were exposed to various learning events involving different individuals.
  • Performance in categorization tasks was analyzed to assess the influence of individual tracking and representation.

    • Main Results:

    • Human subjects demonstrated the ability to track individuals across distinct events.
    • Participants formed and utilized representations of these individuals in categorization tasks.
    • Findings indicate that learning is not solely based on independent statistical properties of events.

    Conclusions:

    • Human categorization is an inherently representational process, not just statistical.
    • The brain constructs and maintains internal world models that include representations of individuals.
    • These representational structures evolve to track individual histories, accumulate information, and simulate future events.