Chapter2011

The generalized context model: an exemplar model of classification

194 citations0/0 files storedCambridge University Press eBooks

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Categorization, perception, and language Social and Intergroup Psychology Cognitive and psychological constructs research

Abstract

Model description Conceptual overview According to the generalized context model (GCM) (Nosofsky, 1986), people represent categories by storing individual exemplars (or examples) in memory, and classify objects based on their similarity to these stored exemplars. For example, the model assumes that people represent the category of ‘birds’ by storing in memory the vast collection of different sparrows, robins, eagles, ostriches (and so forth) that they have experienced. If an object is sufficiently similar to some of these bird exemplars, then the person would tend to classify the object as a ‘bird’. This exemplar view of categorization contrasts dramatically with major alternative approaches that assume that people form abstract summary representations of categories, such as rules or idealized prototypes. The standard version of the GCM adopts a multidimensional scaling (MDS) approach to modelling similarity relations among exemplars (Shepard, 1958, 1987). In this approach, exemplars are represented as points in a multidimensional psychological space. Similarity between exemplars is a decreasing function of their distance in the space. In many applications, a first step in the modelling is to conduct similarity-scaling studies to derive MDS solutions for the exemplars and to discover their locations in the multidimensional similarity space (Nosofsky, 1992b). A crucial assumption in the modelling, however, is that similarity is not an invariant relation, but a highly context-dependent one. To take an example from Medin and Schaffer (1978), humans and mannequins may be judged as highly similar in a context that emphasizes structural appearance, but would be judged as highly dissimilar in a context that emphasizes vitality.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 194 citations exist upstream.

References

1978Context theory of classification learning.1986Attention, similarity, and the identification-categorization relationship.1987Toward a Universal Law of Generalization for Psychological Science 1974The Processing of Information and Structure 1963Handbook of mathematical psychology: I.1963Handbook Of Mathematical Psychology 1992ALCOVE: An exemplar-based connectionist model of category learning.1976Contemporary Developments in Mathematical Psychology

Cited by

2017Cognitively Plausible Theories of Concept Composition 2015Business Model Innovation: How Iconic Business Models Emerge 2015Argument Structure in Usage-Based Construction Grammar: Experimental and corpus-based perspectives 2017The Role of Simulations in Consumer Experiences and Behavior: Insights from the Grounded Cognition Theory of Desire 2017A neural interpretation of exemplar theory.2012The effect of feedback delay and feedback type on perceptual category learning: The limits of multiple systems.

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.