Understanding classification is a major challenge for formulating theories of both human cognition and artificial intelligence. Classification is a human mental activity which covers such diverse things as forming concepts, categorizing medical patients, recognising an acquaintance, or discriminating phonetic components of a language. This book considers both previous theories and new research and comes up with a new core model which it proposes as the basis of all forms of classification. Two versions of this model are developed, one based on symbol-processing, and one on connectionist architecture, and it is suggested that modules of each type of model coexist in the human cognitive system, competing for control of behavioural output.
Based on Estes's important Fitts Lectures, this volume details a set of psychological concepts and principles that offers a unified interpretation of a wide variety of memory, categorization, and decision-making phenomena. This book is a culmination of more than ten years of research in the field, and stands as a great achievement by one of this century's eminent psychologists.
