This article considers categorical perception (CP) as a crucial process involved in all sort of communication throughout the biological hierarchy, i.e. in all of biosemiosis. Until now, there has been consideration of CP exclusively within the functional cycle of perception–cognition–action and it has not been considered the possibility to extend this kind of phenomena to the mere physiological level. To generalise the notion of CP in this sense, I have proposed to distinguish between categorical perception (...) (CP) and categorical sensing (CS) in order to extend the CP framework to all communication processes in living systems, including intracellular, intercellular, metabolic, physiological, cognitive and ecological levels. The main idea is to provide an account that considers the heterarchical embeddedness of many instances of CP and CS. This will take me to relate the hierarchical nature of categorical sensing and perception with the equally hierarchical issues of the “binding problem”, “triadic causality”, the “emergent interpretant” and the increasing semiotic freedom observed in biological and cognitive systems. (shrink)

In this chapter, I critically examine two of the main approaches to colour categorization in cognitive science: the perceptual salience theory and linguistic relativism. I then turn to reviewing several decades of psychological research on colour categorical perception (CP). A careful assessment of relevant findings suggests that most of the experimental effects that have been understood in terms of CP actually fall on the cognition side of the perception-cognition divide: they are effects of colour language, for example, (...) on memory or decision-making. (shrink)

Categorical perception (CP) refers to how similar things look different depending on whether they are classified as the same category. Many studies demonstrate that adult humans show CP for human emotional faces. It is widely debated whether the effect can be accounted for solely by perceptual differences (structural differences among emotional faces) or whether additional perceiver-based conceptual knowledge is required. In this review, I discuss the phenomenon of CP and key studies showing CP for emotional faces. I then (...) discuss a new model of emotion which highlights how perceptual and conceptual knowledge interact to explain how people see discrete emotions in others’ faces. In doing so, I discuss how language (emotion words included in the paradigm) contribute to CP. (shrink)

Why do we draw the boundaries between “blue” and “green”, where we do? One proposed answer to this question is that we categorize color the way we do because we perceive color categorically. Starting in the 1950’s, the phenomenon of “categorical perception” (CP) encouraged such a response. CP refers to the fact that adjacent color patches are more easily discriminated when they straddle a category boundary than when they belong to the same category. In this paper, I make (...) three related claims. (1) Although what seems to guide discrimination performances seems to indeed be categorical information, the evidence in favor of the fact that categorical perception infl uences the way we perceive color is not convincing. (2) That CP offers a useful account of categorization is not obvious.While aiming at accounting for categorization, CP itself requires an account of categories. This being said, CP remains an interesting phenomenon. Why and how is our discrimination behavior linked to our categories? It is suggested that linguistic labels determine CP through a naming strategy to which participants resort while discriminating colors. This paper’s fi nal point is (3) that the naming strategy account is not enough. Beyond category labels, what seems to guide discrimination performance is category structure. (shrink)

Categories can affect our perception of the world, rendering between-category differences more salient than within-category ones. Across many studies, such categorical perception has been observed for the basic-level categories of one's native language. Other research points to categorical distinctions beyond the basic level, but it does not demonstrate CP for such distinctions. Here we provide such a demonstration. Specifically, we show CP in English speakers for the non-basic distinction between “warm” and “cool” colors, claimed to represent (...) the earliest stage of color lexicon evolution. Notably, the advantage for discriminating colors that straddle the warm–cool boundary was restricted to the right visual field—the same behavioral signature previously observed for basic-level categories. This pattern held in a replication experiment with increased power. Our findings show that categorical distinctions beyond the basic-level repertoire of one's native language are psychologically salient and may be spontaneously accessed during normal perceptual processing. (shrink)

This paper offers a conceptual clarification of the phenomenon commonly referred to as categorical perception of color, both in adults and in infants. First, I argue against the common notion of categorical perception as involving a distortion of the perceptual color space. The effects observed in the categorical perception research concern categorical discrimination performance and the underlying processing; they need not directly reflect the relations of color similarity and difference. Moreover, the methodology of (...) the research actually presupposes that the relations of similarity and difference do not vary with languages. The observed categorical perception effects should be conceived independently of the perceptual color space. Second, I challenge the usual opinion that the existing evidence on infant “categorical perception” allows us to conclude that infants perceptually categorize color, and in particular, that they have perceptual categories that resemble the basic color categories of English. Such conclusions rest on an unjustified interpretation of the infant “categorical perception” findings in terms of adult linguistic categorical boundaries. Based on the suggested new understanding, I propose that the phenomenon, as present in infants, should be conceived and examined as a possible explanatory factor with respect to the existing patterns of color naming in languages of the world. (shrink)

High and low alexithymia scorers were confronted with a modified visual oddball task that allowed the study of categorical perception of emotional expressions on faces. Participants had to quickly detect a deviant (rare) morphed face that shared or did not share the same emotional expression as the frequent one. Expected categorical perception effects, which were also neurophysiologically indexed, showed that rare stimuli were detected faster if they depicted a different emotional expression compared to rare stimuli depicting (...) the same emotional expression than the frequent one. Even if no differences were observed at a behavioural level, high alexithymia scorers evidenced overall delayed neurophysiological responses in components related to the attentional processing of rare emotional faces. Moreover, the categorical perception effects for event-related components associated with the attentional processing were smaller in high alexithymia scorers and were even absent for anger. These results show that high alexithymia scorers present discrimination delays that are already observed at the attentional level. (shrink)

Studies of the conceptual abilities of nonhuman primates demonstrate the substantial range of these abilities as well as their limitations. Such abilities range from categorization on the basis of shared physical attributes, associative relations and functions to abstract concepts as reflected in analogical reasoning about relations between relations. The pattern of results from these studies point to a fundamental distinction between monkeys and apes in both their implicit and explicit conceptual capacities. Monkeys, but not apes, might be best regarded as (...) “paleo‐logicans” in the sense that they form common class concepts of identity on the basis of identical predicates (i.e., shared features). The discrimination of presumably more abstract relations commonly involves relatively simple procedural strategies mediated by associative processes likely shared by all mammals. There is no evidence that monkeys can perceive, let alone judge, relations‐between‐relations. This analogical conceptual capacity is found only in chimpanzees and humans. Interestingly, the “analogical ape,” like the child, can make its analogical knowledge explicit only if it is first provided with a symbol system by which propositional representations can be encoded and manipulated. (shrink)

Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 2, Page 414-425, April 2022.

Some of the features of animal and human categorical perception (CP) for color, pitch and speech are exhibited by neural net simulations of CP with one-dimensional inputs: When a backprop net is trained to discriminate and then categorize a set of stimuli, the second task is accomplished by "warping" the similarity space (compressing within-category distances and expanding between-category distances). This natural side-effect also occurs in humans and animals. Such CP categories, consisting of named, bounded regions of similarity space, (...) may be the ground level out of which higher-order categories are constructed; nets are one possible candidate for the mechanism that learns the sensorimotor invariants that connect arbitrary names (elementary symbols?) to the nonarbitrary shapes of objects. This paper examines how and why such compression/expansion effects occur in neural nets. (shrink)

After people learn to sort objects into categories they see them differently. Members of the same category look more alike and members of different categories look more different. This phenomenon of within-category compression and between-category separation in similarity space is called categorical perception (CP). It is exhibited by human subjects, animals and neural net models. In backpropagation nets trained first to auto-associate 12 stimuli varying along a onedimensional continuum and then to sort them into 3 categories, CP arises (...) as a natural side-effect because of four factors: (1) Maximal interstimulus separation in hidden-unit space during autoassociation learning, (2) movement toward linear separability during categorization learning, (3) inverse-distance repulsive force exerted by the between-category boundary, and (4) the modulating effects of input iconicity, especially in interpolating CP to untrained regions of the continuum. Once similarity space has been "warped" in this way, the compressed and separated "chunks" have symbolic labels which could then be combined into symbol strings that constitute propositions about objects. The meanings of such symbolic representations would be "grounded" in the system's capacity to pick out from their sensory projections the object categories that the propositions were about. (shrink)

This study investigated whether and how a person's varied series of lexical categories corresponding to different discriminatory characteristics of the same colors affect his or her perception of colors. In three experiments, Chinese participants were primed to categorize four graduated colors—specifically dark green, light green, light blue, and dark blue—into green and blue; light color and dark color; and dark green, light green, light blue, and dark blue. The participants were then required to complete a visual search task. Reaction (...) times in the visual search task indicated that different lateralized categorical perceptions of color corresponded to the various priming situations. These results suggest that all of the lexical categories corresponding to different discriminatory characteristics of the same colors can influence people's perceptions of colors and that color perceptions can be influenced differently by distinct types of lexical categories depending on the context. (shrink)

Proponents of cognitive penetration often argue for the thesis on the basis of combined intuitions about categorical perception and perceptual learning. The claim is that beliefs penetrate perceptions in the course of learning to perceive categories. I argue that this "diachronic" penetration thesis is false. In order to substantiate a robust notion of penetration, the beliefs that enable learning must describe the particular ability that subjects learn. However, they cannot do so, since in order to help with learning (...) they must instruct learners to employ previously existing abilities. I argue that a better approach recognizes that we can have sophisticated causal precursors to perceptual learning, but that the learning process itself must operate outside of cognitive influence. (shrink)

This study investigated the perception of Mandarin tonal alternations in disyllabic words. In Mandarin, a low-dipping Tone3 is converted to a high-rising Tone2 when followed by another Tone3, known as third tone sandhi. Although previous studies showed statistically significant differences in F0 between a high-rising Sandhi-Tone3 and a Tone2, native Mandarin listeners failed to correctly categorize these two tones in perception tasks. The current study utilized the visual-world paradigm in eye-tracking to further examine whether acoustic details in lexical (...) tone aid lexical access in Mandarin. Results showed that Mandarin listeners tend to process Tone2 as Tone2 whereas they tend to first process Sandhi-T3 as both Tone3 and Tone2, then later detect the acoustic differences between the two tones revealed by the sandhi context, and finally activate the target word during lexical access. The eye-tracking results suggest that subtle acoustic details of F0 may facilitate lexical access in automatic fashion in a tone language. (shrink)

Music impacting on speech processing is vividly evidenced in most reports involving professional musicians, while the question of whether the facilitative effects of music are limited to experts or may extend to amateurs remains to be resolved. Previous research has suggested that analogous to language experience, musicianship also modulates lexical tone perception but the influence of amateur musical experience in adulthood is poorly understood. Furthermore, little is known about how acoustic information and phonological information of lexical tones are processed (...) by amateur musicians. This study aimed to provide neural evidence of cortical plasticity by examining categorical perception of lexical tones in Chinese adults with amateur musical experience relative to the non-musician counterparts. Fifteen adult Chinese amateur musicians and an equal number of non-musicians participated in an event-related potential (ERP) experiment. Their mismatch negativities (MMNs) to lexical tones from Mandarin Tone 2–Tone 4 continuum and non-speech tone analogs were measured. It was hypothesized that amateur musicians would exhibit different MMNs to their non-musician counterparts in processing two aspects of information in lexical tones. Results showed that the MMN mean amplitude evoked by within-category deviants was significantly larger for amateur musicians than non-musicians regardless of speech or non-speech condition. This implies the strengthened processing of acoustic information by adult amateur musicians without the need of focused attention, as the detection of subtle acoustic nuances of pitch was measurably improved. In addition, the MMN peak latency elicited by across-category deviants was significantly shorter than that by within-category deviants for both groups, indicative of the earlier processing of phonological information than acoustic information of lexical tones at the pre-attentive stage. The results mentioned above suggest that cortical plasticity can still be induced in adulthood, hence non-musicians should be defined more strictly than before. Besides, the current study enlarges the population demonstrating the beneficial effects of musical experience on perceptual and cognitive functions, namely, the effects of enhanced speech processing from music are not confined to a small group of experts but extend to a large population of amateurs. (shrink)

Humans appear to be possible candidates for group selection because they are often said to live in bands, clans, and tribes. These terms, however, are only names for conceptual categories of people. They do not designate enduring bounded gatherings of people that might be “vehicles of selection.” Hence, group selection has probably not been a major force in human evolution.

There are many entry points into the problem of categorization. Two particularly important ones are the so-called top-down and bottom-up approaches. Top-down approaches such as artificial intelligence begin with the symbolic names and descriptions for some categories already given; computer programs are written to manipulate the symbols. Cognitive modeling involves the further assumption that such symbol-interactions resemble the way our brains do categorization. An explicit expectation of the top-down approach is that it will eventually join with the bottom-up approach, which (...) tries to model how the hardware of the brain works: sensory systems, motor systems and neural activity in general. The assumption is that the symbolic cognitive functions will be implemented in brain function and linked to the sense organs and the organs of movement in roughly the way a program is implemented in a computer, with its links to peripheral devices such as transducers and effectors. (shrink)

Concepts and Conceptual Development: Ecological and Intellectual Factors in Categorization ULRIC NEISSER, 1987 Cambridge, Cambridge University Press x+384 pp., $39.50 Categorical Perception STEVAN HARNAD, 1987 Cambridge, Cambridge University Press x+599 pp., $59.50.

In Perception: First Form of Mind, Tyler Burge develops an understanding of the most primitive type of representational mind: perception. Focusing on its form, function, and underlying capacities, as indicated in the sciences of perception, Burge provides an account of the representational content and formal representational structure of perceptual states, and develops a formal semantics for them. The account is elaborated by an explanation of how the representational form is embedded in an iconic format. These structures are (...) then situated in current theoretical accounts of the processing of perceptual representations, with an emphasis on the formation of perceptual categorizations. An exploration of the relationship between perception and other primitive capacities-conation, attention, memory, anticipation, affect, learning, and imagining-clarifies the distinction between perceiving, with its associated capacities, and thinking, with its associated capacities. Drawing on a broad range of historical and contemporary research, rather than relying on introspection or ordinary talk about perception, Perception: First Form of Mind is a scientifically rigorous and agenda-setting work in the philosophy of perception and the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Are color categories the evolutionary product of their usefulness in communication, or is this an accidental benefit they give us? It is argued here that embodiment constraints on color categorization suggest that communication is an add-on at best. Thus, the Steels & Belpaeme (S&B) model may be important in explaining coordination, but only at the margin. Furthermore, the concentration on discrimination is questionable: coclassification is at least as important.