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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