Journal article
Exploring the conceptual universe
C Kemp
Psychological Review | AMER PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOC | Published : 2012
DOI: 10.1037/a0029347
Abstract
Humans can learn to organize many kinds of domains into categories, including real-world domains such as kinsfolk and synthetic domains such as sets of geometric figures that vary along several dimensions. Psychologists have studied many individual domains in detail, but there have been few attempts to characterize or explore the full space of possibilities. This article provides a formal characterization that takes objects, features, and relations as primitives and specifies conceptual domains by combining these primitives in different ways. Explaining how humans are able to learn concepts within all of these domains is a challenge for computational models, but I argue that this challenge c..
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Awarded by National Science Foundation
Funding Acknowledgements
Code and data are available at www.charleskemp.com/code/conceptualuniverse.html. An early version of this work was presented at the 23rd Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, December 2009, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. This work was supported in part by National Science Foundation Grant CDI-0835797 and by the Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse Opportunity Fund. Many of the ideas in this article grew out of previous collaborations with Noah Goodman and Joshua Tenenbaum. I thank Faye Han, Rukmani Sahay, and Maureen Satyshur for assisting with the experiments, and Michael Lee, Mike Oaksford, and Ronaldo Vigo for valuable contributions.