Concepts and Categories (830:637)
Professor Jacob Feldman
Spring, 2016
Goals of the course. The formation, representation, and use of concepts and categories lie at the foundations of thought processes. These topics have been extensively studied by philosophers and psychologists, albeit without agreement on many fundamental issues. More recently, many basic questions about induction, learning, and representation have also been investigated by computer scientists and statisticians, in many cases touching on traditional issues from a novel and enlightening perspective. This course will investigate concepts and categories, primarily focusing on the psychological literature, and occasionally bringing philosophical and mathematical perspectives to bear as well. Topics will include mechanisms of induction and generalization, compositionality, conceptual coherence, conceptual complexity, similarity, and feature selection.
Time and place: Psychology (Busch) 333, Tuesdays, 2:30 - 5:00pm.
Graded assignments. Graded assignments will consist of two paper and one in-class presentation. Details will be discussed in class.
Weekly assignment. Each week, each student will be expected to send me a single question or comment (at least a sentence, at most a long paragraph) on each of that week’s readings by e-mail (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.). These do not have to be eloquent pronouncements or summaries. Rather, they should be casual but thoughtful remarks or queries concerning something that struck you or puzzled you.
Tentative schedule of readings
| Week1 | Introduction: induction and generalization | - |
| Week 2 | Classical concept learning | Bruner, Goodnow & Austin (1956); Shepard, Hovland & Jenkins (1961) |
| Week 3 | Prototype models | Rosch et al. (1976); Rosch (1978) |
| Week 4 | Exemplar models | Nosofsky (1988); Kruschke (1992) |
| Week 5 | Decision-bound models; Mixture models | Maddox & Ashby (1993); Rosseel (2002) |
| Week 6 | Theory theory | Murphy & Medin (1985); Rehder (2003) |
| Week 7 | Simplicity-based models | Feldman (2000); Sober (2002) |
| Week 8 | Hybrid models | Nosofsky, Palmeri & McKinley (1994); Hahn & Chater (1996) |
| Week 9 | Compositionality | Smith, Osherson, Rips & Keane (1988); Fodor & Lepore (1996) |
| Week 10 | Rational models | Anderson (1991); Tenenbaum & Griffiths (2001) |
| Week 11 | Features | Goldstone (1994); Schyns, Goldstone & Thibaut (1998) |
| Week 12 | Neuroscience of concepts | Ashby & Ell (2001); Quiroga (2012) |
| Week 13 | Concepts and culture | Davidoff, Davies & Roberson (1999); Ojalehto & Medin (2015) |
