Harry Chesley wrote:
On 1/9/2009 9:45 AM, Richard Loosemore wrote:
 There are certainly experiments that might address some of your
 concerns, but I am afraid you will have to acquire a general
 knowledge of what is known, first, to be able to make sense of what
 they might tell you.  There is nothing that can be plucked and
 delivered as a direct answer.

I was not asking for a complete answer. I was asking for experiments that shed light on the area. I don't expect a mature answer, only more food for thought. Your answer that there are such experiments, but you're not going to tell me what they are is not a useful one. Don't worry about whether I can digest the experimental context. Maybe I know more than you assume I do.

What I am trying to say is that you will find answers that are partially relevant to your question scattered across about a third of the chapters of any comprehensive introduction to cognitive psychology. And then, at a deeper level, you will find something of relevance in numerous more specialized documents. But they are so scattered that I could not possibly start to produce a comprehensive list!

For example, the easiest things to mention are "object perception" within a developmental psychology framework (see a dev psych textbook for entire chapters on that); the psycholgy of "concepts" will involve numerous experiments that require judgements of whether objects are same or different (but in each case the experiment will not be focussed on answering the direct question you might be asking); the question of how concepts are represented sometimes involves the dialectic between the "prototype" and "exemplar" camps (see book by Smith and Medin), which partially touches on the question; there are discussions in the connectionist literature about the problem of type-token discrimination (see Norman's chapter at the end of the second PDP volume - McClelland and Rumelhart 1986/7); then there is neurospychology of naming... see books on psychololinguistics like the one written by Trevor Harley for a comprehensive introduction to that area); there are also vast numbers of studies to do with recognition of abstract concepts using neural nets (you could pick up three or four papers that I wrote in the 1990s which center on the problem of extracting the spelled for of words using phoneme clusters if you look at the publications section of my website, susaro.com, but there are thousands of others).........

Then, you could also wait for my own textbook (in preparation) which treats the formation of concepts and the mechanisms of abstraction from the Molecular perspective.


These are just examples picked at random. none of them answer your question, they just give you pieces of the puzzle, for you to assemble into a half-working answer after a couple of years of study ;-).


Anyone who knew the field would say, in response to your inquiry, "But what exactly do you mean by the question....?", and they would say this because your question touches upon about six or seven major areas of inquiry, in the most general possible terms.





Richard Loosemore




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