Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-c4f8m Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-24T12:46:43.200Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Defending the concept of “concepts”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 June 2010

Brett K. Hayes
Affiliation:
School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia. b.hayes@unsw.edu.aulkearney@psy.unsw.edu.au
Lauren Kearney
Affiliation:
School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia. b.hayes@unsw.edu.aulkearney@psy.unsw.edu.au

Abstract

We critically review key lines of evidence and theoretical argument relevant to Machery's “heterogeneity hypothesis.” These include interactions between different kinds of concept representations, unified approaches to explaining contextual effects on concept retrieval, and a critique of empirical dissociations as evidence for concept heterogeneity. We suggest there are good grounds for retaining the concept construct in human cognition.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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

Allen, S. W. & Brooks, L. R. (1991) Specializing the operation of an explicit rule. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 120:319.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ashby, F. G. & Maddox, W. T. (2005) Human category learning. Annual Review of Psychology 56:149–78.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Carmichael, C. & Hayes, B. K. (2001) Prior knowledge and exemplar encoding in children's concept acquisition. Child Development 72:1071–90.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dunn, J. C. (2008) The dimensionality of the remember-know task: A state-trace analysis. Psychological Review 115(2):426–46.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Heit, E. (1994a) Models of the effects of prior knowledge on category learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 20:1264–82.Google ScholarPubMed
Heit, E. & Hayes, B. (2008) Predicting reasoning from visual memory. In: Proceedings of the 29th Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, ed. Sloutsky, V., Love, B. & McCrae, K., pp. 8388. Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Kemp, C. & Tenenbaum, J. (2009) Structured statistical models of inductive reasoning. Psychological Review 116:2058.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kruschke, J. K. (2005) Category learning. In: The handbook of cognition, ed. Lamberts, K. & Goldstone, R. L., pp. 183201. Sage.Google Scholar
Love, B. C., Medin, D. L. & Gureckis, T. M. (2004) SUSTAIN: A network model of category learning. Psychological Review 111:309–32.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Machery, E. (2009) Doing without concepts. Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Markman, A. B. & Ross, B. (2003) Category use and category learning. Psychological Bulletin 129:592613.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Murphy, G. L. (2002) The big book of concepts. MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murphy, G. L. & Medin, D. L. (1985) The role of theories in conceptual coherence. Psychological Review 92:289316.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Newell, B. & Dunn, J. C. (2008) Dimensions in data: Testing psychological models using state-trace analysis. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 12(8):285–90.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rehder, B. & Murphy, G. L. (2003) A knowledge-resonance (KRES) model of category learning. Psychological Bulletin & Review 10:789–94.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Roediger, H. L. (2008) Relativity of remembering: Why the laws of memory vanished. Annual Review of Psychology 59:225–54.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Shafto, P., Coley, J.D. & Baldwin, D. (2007) Effects of time pressure on context-sensitive property induction. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 14:890–94.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed