Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-11T05:17:36.105Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Concepts, correlations, and some challenges for connectionist cognition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2008

Gary F. Marcus
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY 10012; gary.marcus@nyu.eduhttp://www.psych.nyu.edu/gary/
Frank C. Keil
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06510. frank.keil@yale.eduhttp://www.yale.edu/psychology/FacInfo/Keil.html

Abstract

Rogers & McClelland's (R&M's) précis represents an important effort to address key issues in concepts and categorization, but few of the simulations deliver what is promised. We argue that the models are seriously underconstrained, importantly incomplete, and psychologically implausible; more broadly, R&M dwell too heavily on the apparent successes without comparable concern for limitations already noted in the literature.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anderson, J. R. & Betz, J. (2001) A hybrid model of categorization. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 8(4):629–47.Google Scholar
Gentner, D. & Markman, A. B. (1993) Analogy – Watershed or Waterloo? Structural alignment and the development of connectionist models of analogy. In: Advances in neural information processing systems, vol. 5, ed. Hanson, S. J., Cowan, J. D. & Giles, C. L., pp. 855–62. Morgan Kaufmann.Google Scholar
Greif, M. L., Kemler Nelson, D. G., Keil, F. C. & Gutierrez, F. (2006) What do children want to know about animals and artifacts? Domain-specific requests for information. Psychological Science 17(6):455–59.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Keil, F. C. (1989) Concepts, kinds, and cognitive development. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Keil, F. C. (1991b) Theories, concepts, and the acquisition of word meaning. In: Perspectives on language and cognition: Interrelations in development, ed. Byrnes, J. P. & Gelman, S. A.. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kruschke, J. K. (1992) ALCOVE: An exemplar-based connectionist model of category learning. Psychological Review 99(1):2244.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Love, B. C., Medin, D. L. & Gureckis, T. M. (2004) SUSTAIN: A network model of category learning. Psychological Review 111(2):309–32.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Marcus, G. F. (1998a) Can connectionism save constructivism? Cognition 66:153–82.Google Scholar
Marcus, G. F. (1998b) Rethinking eliminative connectionism. Cognitive Psychology 37(3):243–82.Google Scholar
Marcus, G. F. (2000) Children's overregularization and its implications for cognition. In: Cognitive models of language acquisition, ed. Broeder, P. & Murre, J.. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Marcus, G. F. (2001) The algebraic mind: Integrating connectionism and cognitive science. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Nosofsky, R. M. (1986) Attention, similarity and the identification-categorization relationship. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 115(1):3961.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pinker, S. & Prince, A. (1988) On language and connectionism: Analysis of a parallel distributed processing model of language acquisition. Cognition 28:73193.Google Scholar
Rehder, B. (2003) A causal-model theory of conceptual representation and categorization. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 29(6):1141–59.Google ScholarPubMed
Rehder, B. & Kim, S. (2006) How causal knowledge affects classification: A generative theory of categorization. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 32(4):659–83.Google Scholar
Rogers, T. T. & McClelland, J. L. (2004) Semantic cognition: A parallel distributed processing approach. MIT Press.Google Scholar