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Categorical perception
Robert L. Goldstone,
Andrew T. Hendrickson,
Corresponding Author
Robert L. Goldstone
Department of Psychology and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, 47405, USA
Department of Psychology and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47405, USASearch for more papers by this authorAndrew T. Hendrickson
Department of Psychology and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, 47405, USA
Search for more papers by this authorRobert L. Goldstone,
Andrew T. Hendrickson,
Corresponding Author
Robert L. Goldstone
Department of Psychology and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, 47405, USA
Department of Psychology and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47405, USASearch for more papers by this authorAndrew T. Hendrickson
Department of Psychology and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, 47405, USA
Search for more papers by this authorAbstract
Categorical perception (CP) is the phenomenon by which the categories possessed by an observer influences the observers' perception. Experimentally, CP is revealed when an observer's ability to make perceptual discriminations between things is better when those things belong to different categories rather than the same category, controlling for the physical difference between the things. We consider several core questions related to CP: Is it caused by innate and/or learned categories, how early in the information processing stream do categories influence perception, and what is the relation between ongoing linguistic processing and CP? CP for both speech and visual entities are surveyed, as are computational and mathematical models of CP. CP is an important phenomenon in cognitive science because it represents an essential adaptation of perception to support categorizations that an organism needs to make. Sensory signals that could be linearly related to physical qualities are warped in a nonlinear manner, transforming analog inputs into quasi-digital, quasi-symbolic encodings. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
This article is categorized under:
- Psychology > Perception and Psychophysics
FURTHER READING
- Anderson JA, Silverstein JW, Ritz SA, Jones RS. Distinctive features, categorical perception, and probability learning: Some applications of a neural model. Psychol Rev 1977, 84: 413–451.
- Etcoff NL, Magee JJ. Categorical perception of facial expression. Cognition 1992, 44: 227–240.
- Harnad S. Categorical perception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1987.
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