A Two-Stage Model of Category Construction

The current consensus is thot most notural categories are not organized around strict definitions (a list of singly necessary ond jointly sufficient features) but rather according t.a a fomily resemblance (FR) principle: Objects belong to the same category because they are similor to each other and dissimilar to obfects in contrast categories. A number of computational models of category construction hove been developed to provide an’account of how and why people create FR categories (Anderson. 1990; Fisher, 1987). Surprisingly, however, only o few experiments on category construction or free sorting have been run and they suggest that people do not sort examptes by the FR principle. We report several new experiments and a two-stage model for category construction. This model is contrasted with a variety of other models with respect to their ability to account for when FR sorting will and will not occur. The experiments serve to identify one basis for FR sorting and to support the two-stage model. The distinctive property of the two-stage model is that it assumes that people impose more structure than the examples support in the first stage and thot the second stage adjusts for this difference between preferred and perceived structure. We speculate that people do not simply ossimilate probabilistic structures but rather organize them in terms of discrete structures plus noise.