Paleolithic art and cognition.

In this article, I have explored some of the possible relationships between the first appearance of representational art in human history and the early development of human cognition. I argue that most Upper Paleolithic depictions directly represent generalized mental images of their animal subjects rather than percepts or recollected scenes from life and that these images, in turn, are representations of concepts at the basic level of categorization. A common feature of Paleolithic art forms is the salience of parts, and the treatment of parts indicates analytic and synthetic (recombinative) abilities. There are some indications of superordinate categorization. An expansion of conceptual thinking seems to be implied as well as the beginnings of operational thought. The presence and practice of depiction may have had the effect of bringing concepts into consciousness and thus inducing reflection in at least a partially abstract mode.     

The intuitive concept of art

A great deal of work in analytic philosophy of art is related to defining what counts as art. So far, cognitive approaches to art have almost entirely ignored this literature. In this paper, I discuss the role of intuition in analytic philosophy of art to show how an empirical research program on art could take advantage of existing work in analytic philosophy. I suggest that the first step of this research program should be to understand how people intuitively categorize something as art. Drawing on results from cognitive science and analytic philosophy, I show that the intuitive categorization of an artifact as art rests on the intentions attributed (frequently implicitly) to the creator of the artifact based both on its appearance and on background knowledge. I discuss how the issue of categorization is related to other empirical issues concerning our relationship to works of art, such as perception, appreciation, interpretation, and evaluation.     

Levels of stimulus control: a functional approach

This paper surveys some illustrative experiments on categorization of visual stimuli by animals other than human. The results suggest a classification of categorical powers in five steps from simple discrimination to rote and open-ended categorization, to concepts and the use of abstract relations. Nonhuman animals evidently readily categorize up to the fourth level as here defined, which is the level of concepts. With difficulty, they can sometimes be induced to rise even to the level of abstract relations. It is at the level of abstract relations that a large gap opens up between human categorizations and categorization by other animals.     

Categorization difficulty is associated with negative evaluation in the “uncanny valley” phenomenon

Human observers often experience strongly negative impressions of human‐like objects falling within a particular range of visual similarity to real humans (the “uncanny valley” phenomenon). We hypothesized that negative impressions in the uncanny valley phenomenon are related to a difficulty in object categorization. We produced stimulus images by morphing two of each of real, stuffed, and cartoon human face images (Experiment 1). Observers were asked to categorize each of these images as either category and evaluated the likability of the image. The results revealed that the longest latency, the highest ambiguity in categorization, and the lowest likability score co‐occurred at consistent morphing percentages. Similar results were obtained even when we employed stimulus images that were created by morphing two of each of real, stuffed, and cartoon dog images (Experiment 2). However, the effect of categorization difficulty on evaluation was weak when two real human faces were morphed (Experiment 3). These results suggest that the difficulty in categorizing an object as either of two dissimilar categories is linked to negative evaluation regardless of whether the object is human‐related or not.     

Learning time-varying categories

Many kinds of objects and events in our world have a strongly time-dependent quality. However, most theories about concepts and categories either are insensitive to variation over time or treat it as a nuisance factor that produces irrational order effects during learning. In this article, we present two category learning experiments in which we explored peoples’ ability to learn categories whose structure is strongly time-dependent. We suggest that order effects in categorization may in part reflect a sensitivity to changing environments, and that understanding dynamically changing concepts is an important part of developing a full account of human categorization.     

Development of categorization in infancy: advancing forward to the animate/inanimate level

Three experiments are reported on the development of object categorization skills during the second year of life. Experiment 1 examined whether 14- and 18-month-old infants were capable of performing categorization at the animate/inanimate (A/I) level using a sequential touching task. The 18-month-olds were significantly above chance and the 14-month-olds were also approaching above-chance significance, which is the highest level of inclusiveness ever tested in infancy. In Experiments 2 and 3, 14-month-old infants participated in a sequential touching task in which the part features of animate and inanimate objects were modified, allowing for a test of partonomic (i.e., legs and wheels) vs. taxonomic (i.e., animates and inanimates) categorization. Infants did not favor partonomic categorization, suggesting that A/I categories are not formed solely based on object parts such as legs and wheels.     

Scope of linguistic influence: does a classifier system alter object concepts?

Whether and to what extent conceptual structure is universal is of great importance for understanding the nature of human concepts. Two major factors that might affect concepts are language and culture. The authors investigated whether these 2 factors affect concepts of everyday objects in any significant ways. Specifically, they tested (a) whether the system of grammatical categorization by classifiers influenced the conceptual structure of speakers of classifier languages, and (b) whether Westerners organized object concepts around taxonomic relations whereas Easterners organized them around thematic relations, as proposed by R. E. Nisbett (2003). The relative importance of 3 types of relations--taxonomic, thematic, and classifier--for Chinese and German speakers was tested using a range of tasks, including categorization, similarity judgment, property induction, and fast-speed word-picture matching. Some support for linguistic relativity as well as for the cultural-specific cognition proposal was found in some tasks, but these effects were miniscule compared with the importance of taxonomic and thematic relations for both language-culture groups. The authors conclude that the global structure of everyday object concepts is strikingly similar across different cultures and languages.     

Parts in object concepts: Experiments with artificial categories

Previous research has demonstrated that basic-level categories are associated with the parts of objects. Five experiments were conducted to investigate whether this correlation is caused by a psychological principle that requires basic concepts to have common parts. This hypothesis was investigated in the experiments by separating part and nonpart information in artificial categories. Basic-level structure was measured in two ways: as the level with the highest ratio of within-category similarity to between-category similarity, and as the level with the fastest categorization time in an object-identification task. The results revealed that basic-level structure could be found in categories that did not have parts in common. Furthermore, nonpart information, such as size, color, and texture, could both enhance the basic level and eliminate the basic-level advantage, depending on whether the nonpart information was consistent with or contradicted the part information. These results suggest that, psychologically, parts are neither necessary nor sufficient to form a basic level.     

Reading a “Titian”: Visual Methods and the Limits of Interpretation

Contemporary criminology is witnessing something of a “visual turn” and as researchers develop their methods of enquiry it is clear that interdisciplinary scholarship will play a key role in shaping inventive approaches in it. In this article, I discuss some of the different ways art historians have “read” images and the multiple connections they have forged to understand an artwork, before turning to how these approaches have been mobilized in a single example: Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas, which dates from the 1570s, and is among the most disturbing images in the entire history of art.     

The effects of kinetic occlusion and categorization on amodal completion. A comment on Gerbino and Salmaso (1987)

The experimental study of Gerbino and Salmaso (1987) focused on the process of amodal completion, i.e. the process that leads to the impression of a total pattern in the absence of information about all parts of the pattern. One of the questions that they have attempted to answer with respect to this process is whether or not it depends on the categorization of the modal part (i.e. the part about which visual information is present) as a modification of a complete prototype. The major conclusion of their experiments is that amodal completion does not depend upon categorization. Furthermore, they interpret their results as indicating that neither the truncated form of the occluded part nor the unification/segregation of contour segments are phenomenally real. We designed some variants of the tunnel effect to demonstrate (1) that the explicit categorization of some parts of the input can have an influence on amodal completion and (2) that the truncated form of a pattern can be phenomenally real. Our results corroborate these hypotheses and can, therefore, interpreted as refuting two rather central claims of Gerbino and Salmaso (1987). The conclusion of our experiment must be that amodal completion is not as primary as they have supposed but can be influenced by kinetic occlusion and categorization stored in visual memory.     

Isolated and interrelated concepts

A continuum between purely isolated and purely interrelated concepts is described. Along this continuum, a concept is interrelated to the extent that it is influenced by other concepts. Methods for manipulating and identifying a concept’s degree of interrelatedness are introduced. Relatively isolated concepts can be empirically identified by a relatively large use of nondiagnostic features, and by better categorization performance for a concept’s prototype than for a caricature of the concept. Relatively interrelated concepts can be identified by minimal use of nondiagnostic features, and by better categorization performance for a caricature than for a prototype. A concept is likely to be relatively isolated when subjects are instructed to create images for their concepts rather than find discriminating features, when concepts are given unrelated labels, and when the categories that are displayed alternate rarely between trials. The entire set of manipulations and measurements supports a graded distinction between isolated and interrelated concepts. The distinction is applied to current models of category learning, and a connectionist framework for interpreting the empirical results is presented.     

Impact of intuitive theories on feature recruitment throughout the continuum of expertise

Expertise in object domains involves both the perceptual learning of the differentiating and higher order features that are indicative of concepts and the elaboration of intuitive theories. Triad-similarity judgments, feature-salience ratings, and verbal protocols were used to investigate the effects of theories on the recruitment of features across different categorization contexts, as well as the degree to which expert categorization skills transferred to less familiar domains. Whereas novices considered features that indicated overall similarity to be more perceptually salient than were modified parts that indicated taxonomic relations, experts found them equally salient. Experts’ theories were instrumental in directing feature recruitment in contexts involving identification, image generation, and similarity decisions. Experts’ theories also supported the transfer of categorization skills to related, less familiar domains. The relation of mutual dependence between perceptual learning and theory development throughout the continuum of expertise is considered.     

Can Levinson's Intentional‐Historical Definition of Art Accommodate Revolutionary Art?

In this article, I examine whether Jerrold Levinson's intentional‐historical definition of art can successfully accommodate revolutionary art. For Levinson, an item is art if it was intended to be regarded as some prior art was regarded. But revolutionary art involves a regard that is “completely distinct” from preexisting art regards. I consider and reject Levinson's proposed solutions to the problem of accommodating revolutionary art. I then defend an alternative account of transgressive art regard. Unfortunately for the intentional‐historical definition, the acceptance of transgressive art regard in conjunction with some recent theories of the development of human behavioral modernity may commit the definition to including nonart, prehistoric tools.     

Definitional deficit: a model of senile dementia in context

This article presents some general theoretical concepts that can be used to consider processes of reality construction in interpersonal contexts. I developed a model of family context that taps affective dimensions of reality construction and used this model to explore these processes as highlighted by the labeling of symptoms of senile dementia. Ethnographic observations of 45 families with aged members were used to sketch a dichotomous typology of family-context patterns that promote symptom identification versus patterns that do not. The model suggests that the categorization of behavior as symptomatic or normal in context may be related to the extent to which reality construction processes are shared among members.     

How are religious concepts created? A form of cognition and its effects

Science that needs logical demonstration has failed to eliminate religious concepts. It is as if they have own validity that cannot be broken by scientific knowledge we trust the most at present. In this paper, I will attempt to establish a new cognitive theory to help explain the basis of belief in religious concepts. This form of cognition will be named simply unifying-induction or unifying-inductive cognition. As illustrations, I will consider some typical religious discourses involving concepts such as “all-in-one” or “one is everything.” It is these typically religious discourses that science has not been able to easily sweep away by its logical scientific proofs. In the end, although we perhaps cannot know if the religious beings such as gods really exist or not, we may understand these concepts are very the creation of human cognition. It also has important implications for other disciplines such as robotics, developmental psychology, cognitive archaeology, the history of science, the study of religion and so on.     

Global predominance in object recognition: artefact or treatment rule?

This paper provides a critical evaluation of the idea that, relative to the identity of the parts (local aspect), the configuration of the parts (global aspect) is of special importance during perceptual analysis. The controversy surrounding the global precedence phenomenon (Navon, 1977) is reviewed. In particular, I evaluate and reject the hypothesis that global precedence is simply the product of the greater discriminability of the global aspect. Instead, I propose that one general rule characterizing preattentive perceptual processing is a broad categorization of global information. I present the empirical evidence supporting this model and suggest some direction for future studies.     

Parts and the basic level in natural categories and artificial stimuli: Comments on Murphy (1991)

Natural taxonomies consist of categories that vary in level of abstraction. Categories at the basic level, such as chair and apple, are preferred in a broad range of situations (Rosch, Mervis, Gray, Johnson, & Boyes-Braem, 1976). Several studies have revealed qualitative differences between the basic level and other levels. For example, Tversky and Hemenway (1984) presented evidence that parts proliferative at the basic level; they proposed that parts link the appearance of category members with their functions. Although not taking issue with these findings, Murphy (1991) investigated whether parts are necessary or sufficient for a basic level. In an attempt to demonstrate that parts are not necessary, Murphy used artificial stimuli that did not capture the essential features of natural taxonomies. These discrepancies preclude any conclusions based on his studies. Murphy's data also do not support his claim that parts are not sufficient for a basic level. Finally, it is unlikely that pursuing questions of necessity or sufficiency will produce insights into human categorization.