Dear Ontologers,
I found
an article on sciencedirec.comt
that relates to experimental evidence on how people form
categories, and how
they associate multiple attributes to categories. This
is a quote from
the abstract of the article:
“Patients learned to assign abstract
visual stimuli to two
categories. The categories conformed to a family
resemblance structure in which
no individual stimulus features were fully diagnostic;
thus the task required participants
to form representations that integrate multiple features
into a single concept.
Patients were unable to do this, instead responding only
on the basis of
individual features.”
They called the
condition of these
patients “semantic dementia” because the patients lost
the ability
to consider multiple alternative representations
simultaneously. The
article is at:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010945213002517
They describe a
structural theory which
they call a “spoke and hub” structure in the affected
brain area
(ALT) where each spoke is one sensory modality that gets
integrated at the
hub.
The way they
describe the deficit sounds
to me that the loss was in deduction, specifically in
integrating each of the
spokes into a coherent response based on all the
spokes.
When concepts had
multiple spokes,
(attributes or properties in ontolog talk), the patients
couldn’t use
multiple properties, and relied on just one instead,
leading to errors of
perception and interpretation.
It occurred to me
that this model of hub
and spoke diversity in human concepts and concept
learning has some suggestive
value re why it is so difficult to get consistent naming
of concepts as common
as “river”s.
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT
EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
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