Cognitive categorization

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Categorization is a type of cognition involving conceptual differentiation between characteristics of conscious experience, such as objects, events, or ideas. It involves the abstraction and differentiation of aspects of experience by sorting and distinguishing between groupings, through classification or typification on the basis of traits, features, similarities or other criteria that are universal to the group. Categorization is considered one of the most fundamental cognitive abilities, and it is studied particularly by psychology and cognitive linguistics.

Categorization is sometimes considered synonymous with classification (cf., Classification synonyms). Categorization and classification allow humans to organize things, objects, and ideas that exist around them and simplify their understanding of the world. Categorization is something that humans and other organisms do: "doing the right thing with the right kind of thing." The activity of categorizing things can be nonverbal or verbal. For humans, both concrete objects and abstract ideas are recognized, differentiated, and understood through categorization. Objects are usually categorized for some adaptive or pragmatic purposes.

Categorization is grounded in the features that distinguish the category's members from nonmembers. Categorization is important in learning, prediction, inference, decision making, language, and many forms of organisms' interaction with their environments.

Overview

Categories are distinct collections of concrete or abstract instances (category members) that are considered equivalent by the cognitive system. Using category knowledge requires one to access mental representations that define the core features of category members (cognitive psychologists refer to these category-specific mental representations as concepts).

To categorization theorists, the categorization of objects is often considered using taxonomies with three hierarchical levels of abstraction. For example, a plant could be identified at a high level of abstraction by simply labeling it a flower, a medium level of abstraction by specifying that the flower is a rose, or a low level of abstraction by further specifying this particular rose as a dog rose. Categories in a taxonomy are related to one another via class inclusion, with the highest level of abstraction being the most inclusive and the lowest level of abstraction being the least inclusive. The three levels of abstraction are as follows:

• Superordinate level, Genus (e.g., Flower) - The highest and most inclusive level of abstraction. Exhibits the highest degree of generality and the lowest degree of within-category similarity.
• Basic Level, Species (e.g., Rose) - The middle level of abstraction. Rosch and colleagues (1976) suggest the basic level to be the most cognitively efficient. Basic level categories exhibit high within-category similarities and high between-category dissimilarities. Furthermore, the basic level is the most inclusive level at which category exemplars share a generalized identifiable shape. Adults most-often use basic level object names, and children learn basic object names first.
• Subordinate level (e.g., Dog Rose) - The lowest level of abstraction. Exhibits the highest degree of specificity and within-category similarity.

Beginning of categorization

The essential issue in studying categorization is how conceptual differentiation between characteristics of conscious experience begins in young, inexperienced organisms. Growing experimental data show evidence of differentiation between characteristics of objects and events in newborns and even in foetuses during the prenatal period. This development succeeds in organisms that only demonstrate simple reflexes (see articles on the binding problem, cognition, cognitive development, infant cognitive development, multisensory integration, and perception). For their nervous systems, the environment is a cacophony of sensory stimuli: electromagnetic waves, chemical interactions, and pressure fluctuations.

Categorization thought involves the abstraction and differentiation of aspects of experience that rely upon such power of mind as intentionality and perception. The problem is that these young organisms should already grasp the abilities of intentionality and perception to categorize the environment. Intentionality and perception already require their ability to recognise objects (or events), i.e., to identify objects by the sensory system. This is a vicious circle: categorization needs intentionality and perception, which only appear in the categorized environment. So, the young, inexperienced organism does not have abstract thinking and cannot independently accomplish conceptual differentiation between characteristics of conscious experience if it solves the categorization problem alone.

Studying the origins of social cognition in child development, developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello developed the notion of Shared intentionality to account for unaware processes during social learning after birth to explain processes in shaping intentionality. Further, Latvian professor Igor Val Danilov expanded this concept to the intrauterine period by introducing a Mother-Fetus Neurocognitive model: a hypothesis of neurophysiological processes occurring during Shared intentionality. The hypothesis attempts to explain the beginning of cognitive development in organisms at different levels of bio-system complexity, from interpersonal dynamics to neuronal interactions. Evidence in neuroscience supports the hypothesis. Hyperscanning research studies observed inter-brain activity under conditions without communication in pairs while subjects were solving the shared cognitive problem, and they registered an increased inter-brain activity in contrast to the condition when subjects solved a similar problem alone. These data show that collaborative interaction without sensory cues can emerge in mother-child dyads, providing Shared intentionality. It shows the mode to cognize at the stage without communication and abstract thinking. The significance of this knowledge is that it can reveal the new direction to study consciousness since the latter refers to awareness of internal and external existence relying on intentionality, perception and categorization of the environment.

Theories

Classical view

{{#invoke:Labelled list hatnote|labelledList|Main article|Main articles|Main page|Main pages}} The classical theory of categorization, is a term used in cognitive linguistics to denote the approach to categorization that appears in Plato and Aristotle and that has been highly influential and dominant in Western culture, particularly in philosophy, linguistics and psychology. Aristotle's categorical method of analysis was transmitted to the scholastic medieval university through Porphyry's Isagoge. The classical view of categories can be summarized into three assumptions: a category can be described as a list of necessary and sufficient features that its membership must have, categories are discrete in that they have clearly defined boundaries (either an element belongs to one or not, with no possibilities in between), and all the members of a category have the same status. (There are no members of the category which belong more than others).Template:Page needed In the classical view, categories need to be clearly defined, mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive; this way, any entity in the given classification universe belongs unequivocally to one, and only one, of the proposed categories.{{safesubst:#invoke:Unsubst||date=__DATE__ |$B= Template:Fix{{#invoke:Check for unknown parameters|check|unknown={{#switch:

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The classical view of categories first appeared in the context of Western Philosophy in the work of Plato, who, in his Statesman dialogue, introduces the approach of grouping objects based on their similar properties. This approach was further explored and systematized by Aristotle in his Categories treatise, where he analyzes the differences between classes and objects. Aristotle also applied intensively the classical categorization scheme in his approach to the classification of living beings (which uses the technique of applying successive narrowing questions such as "Is it an animal or vegetable?", "How many feet does it have?", "Does it have fur or feathers?", "Can it fly?"...), establishing this way the basis for natural taxonomy.

Examples of the use of the classical view of categories can be found in the western philosophical works of Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Spinoza and John Locke, and in the 20th century in Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, the logical positivists. It has been a cornerstone of analytic philosophy and its conceptual analysis, with more recent formulations proposed in the 1990s by Frank Cameron Jackson and Christopher Peacocke. At the beginning of the 20th century, the question of categories was introduced into the empirical social sciences by Durkheim and Mauss, whose pioneering work has been revisited in contemporary scholarship.

The classical model of categorization has been used at least since the 1960s from linguists of the structural semantics paradigm, by Jerrold Katz and Jerry Fodor in 1963, which in turn have influenced its adoption also by psychologists like Allan M. Collins and M. Ross Quillian.<ref name="Croft2004ch4">{{Cite book |last1=Croft |first1=William