Individuals and Their Concepts.

Abstract

Nearly all research on concepts in cognitive psychology is research on categories of objects — categories of teapots or turnips, for example. But when it comes to things that are important to us — people, pets, works of art, special places — we also represent the individuals themselves, not just the categories they belong to. Proper nouns, such as Herman Melville, Toto, Broadway Boogie-Woogie, or Hudson Bay, can denote these individuals, but you can also represent individuals for whom you have no conventional names, like the bed you usually sleep in or your neighbor’s mulberry tree. It is Doug Medin who is mainly responsible for calling category researchers ’ attention to the importance of individual concepts. Medin and Schaffer’s (1978) Context Model proposed that much of what we know about categories we determine from our memories of their exemplars. It’s hard to overestimate the importance of this model: Not only has it produced generations of similar theories of categorization (e.g., Kruschke, 1992; Nosofsky, 1986), but it has also influenced fields as diverse as the psychology of attention (Logan, 2002), social psychology (Smith & Zarate, 1992), and phonology information that concepts afford (e.g., Medin, 1989; Medin & Ortony, 1989), but he still retains a fondness for exemplars. In fact, this tension in Doug’s thinking about concepts is characteristic of a special turn of mind, a form of reasoning that we’re tempted to call “modus medins ” and that the following schema approximates:

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