catperc

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Categories: categorical and continuous. A category, or kind, is a set of things. Membership in the category may be (1) all-or-none, as with "bird": Something either is a bird or it isn't a bird; a penguin is 100% bird, a platypus is 100% not-bird. In this case we would call the category "categorical." Or membership might be (2) a matter of degree, as with "big": Some things are more big and some things are less big. In this case the category is "continuous" (or rather, degree of membership corresponds to some point along a continuum). There are range or context effects as well: elephants are relatively big in the context of animals, relatively small in the context of bodies in general, if we include planets. Many categories, however, particularly concrete sensorimotor categories (things we can see and touch), are a mixture of the two: categorical at an everyday level of magnification, but continuous at a more microscopic level. Color categories are good examples: Central reds are clear

Harnad, S. (2003) Categorical Perception. Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. Nature Publishing Group/Macmillan. Categorical Perception Stevan Harnad Centre de Neuroscience de la Cognition (CNC) Universite du Quebec a Montreal CP 8888 Succursale Centre-Ville Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3C 3P8 harnad@uqam.ca http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ ABSTRACT: Differences can be perceived as gradual and quantitative, as with different shades of gray, or they can be perceived as more abrupt and qualitative, as with different colors. The first is called continuous perception and the second categorical…

catperc

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