Cognitive Developmentt 8, 113-139 (1993)

The Place of Perception in Children's Concepts Susan S. Jones Linda B. Smith

Indiana University

Current research on children's concepts and categories reflects a growing consensus that nonperceptual knowledge is central to concepts and determines category membership, whereas perceptual knowledge is peripheral in concepts and at best a rough guide to category membership. In this article, we assess the theoretical and empirical bases for this view. We examine experiments that seem to support the idea that concepts are principally nonperceptual, and find that the evidence is not compelling. We then turn to research on children's lexical category formation, which highlights multidirectional interactions between perception, language, and other kinds of knowledge, in specific contexts. This evidence suggests that conceptual knowledge encompasses both perceptual and nonperceptual knowledge as equal and interacting partners. The evidence also suggests a view of concepts, not as mentally represented structures, but as assemblies of knowledge computed on-line in specific task contexts.

A view o f concepts as primarily nonperceptual is gaining ground. This view is influencing the kinds o f experiments being done, and perhaps more importantly, the kinds o f experiments not b e i n g done. In this article, we argue that there is no c o m p e l l i n g basis either in theory or in data for the idea that concepts are principally, centrally, or most importantly nonperceptual. We begin by presenting a composite description o f concept structure derived from the proposals of a n u m b e r of researchers. A l t h o u g h this view may not b e held in its precise form by any single theorist, we believe it accurately captures

Preparation of this article was supported by Grant No. PHS ROI HD 28675 from the National Institutes of Health to both authors. The authors especially wish to thank Susan Gelman for providing copies of stimulus pictures from her experiments; and Rob Goldstone, Barbara Landau, Doug Merlin, Susan Gelman, Jean Mandler, and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments. Correspondence and requests for reprints should be sent to Susan S. Jones, Psychology 352, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405. Editor's Note. In the process of its review, this article attracted commentaries that appeared to merit a wider audience. Reviewers' comments and others subsequently solicited arc:presented following the article, together with a response from the authors. Collections of this kind will be considered in the future when they seem to warrant this type of treatment because of the general interest and importance of the issues raised, and the divergence of views among researchers in the area.

Manuscript received December 23, 1991; revision accepted July 23, 1992

113

1 14

Susan S. Jones and Linda B. Smith

the spirit of current research on conceptual development. Second, we consider several lines of evidence usually taken as support for the idea that concepts are principally nonperceptual. We do not find the evidence convincing. Third, we consider research on interactions between perception, language, and other knowledge in children's formation of lexical categories. The findings from this research suggest a view of concepts in which perceptual and nonperceptual information are interacting and equal partners. The emphasis on knowledge interactions also suggests a view of concepts as principally process--as computed on-line and not as static representations. T H E PREVAILING VIEW OF C O N C E P T S We limit our discussion to categories of concrete objects at tile basic level (Rosch, 1978). We use the word eatego O, to refer to the extension of a concept: that is, to all the instances of a concept in the world. We use the word concept to refer to the represented structure (or intension) that allows members of a category to be recognized. In the literature, "'concept" has also most generally been used to refer to representations that are organized into stable units and accessed as wholes. The current zeitgeist on the nature of concepts is represented by the work of, among others, Gelman and Coley (1991), Murphy and Medin (1985), Medin and Ortony (1989), Keil (1989), Nelson (1973, 1974), and Quine (1960, 1969). In this view, our perceptual experiences as we encounter objects in the world are represented at the periphery of our concepts. At the center lies our nonperceptual knowledge: principally, beliefs about the origins and causes of category membership. Thus, at the periphery of our concept of kitten would be a description of its surface characteristics--fur, body and head shape, four-legged, and so forth. At the center would be our understanding of the kitten as a living entity--as an immature cat, as having been born of a cat. In the consensual view of concepts that now has precedence, it is this core of nonperceptual information that is most critical to the functioning of categories, to their stability, to the acquisition of new information, and to the ultimate determination of the category membership of objects in the world. This emphasis on nonperceptual knowledge gives preeminence to understanding how the world works. Further, it presumes that understanding how the world works is not closely related to, and is certainly not transparent in, our perceptual experiences. Different theorists have discussed this view of concepts in different but related ways. One generally accepted idea is that concepts are "theory laden." In this view, nonperceptual properties are at the "core" in the sense that concepts are structured by beliefs about causes, relations, and nonobvious properties (e.g., Murphy & Medin, 1985; Nelson, 1974). Thus, our concept of kitten would contain the ideas that kittens look alike because of their genetic structure, that they have the anatomical parts they do because of their biological origins, that

Perception and Concepts

115

they are playful because they are young. Nelson (1974) was among the first to describe a concept as consisting of a "functional core" synthesized from the various relationships and acts into which the concept enters. Perceptual properties would be added to the functional-relational core of the concept as a product of secondary analysis of concept exemplars. In this view, perceptual properties aid in identifying new concept exemplars. However, " . . . the [perceptual identifying] features are always only probable, whereas the functional core meaning of tile concept is determining" (Nelson, 1974, p. 284). More recently, Murphy and Medin (1985) and Medin and Ortony (1989) have emphasized how "naive theories" or "explanation-based" concepts ate connected to the outer periphery of infomlation about the surface properties of objects. In this view, the surface similarities attended to and their interpretation are directly controlled by the conceptual information at the core. Wisniewski and Medin's (1991) example of learning a hypothetical concept apartment dog illustrates the point. Suppose that by coincidence all the apartment dogs that a learner happened to encounter were brown and small. Wisniewski and Medin suggest that the learner would be unlikely to incorporate both the properties of being brown and being small into the forming concept. The surface property brown is likely to be ignored because it is not related to the reasons why certain breeds are chosen as apartment dogs. Put another way, the surface property brown is not related to the "raison d'6tre" of apartment dogs. Gelman and Coley (1991) have also argued that that the "causal force" behind categories is fundamentally nonperceptual. They write "Similarity is most useful as a rough guide to identifying what something is, whereas theory provides the underlying basis of the classification. For example, birds are often identified by their feather color, yet feather color is not the causal force behind the classification" (Gelman & Coley, 1991, p. 158). Medin and Ortony (1989) have explicitly suggested that people believe that categories have "raisons d'dtre" and that "surface features are frequently constrained by and sometimes generated by the deeper more central parts of concepts" (p. 180). These beliefs figure prominently in how we use, learn from, and learn about categories. Medin and Ortony call this position psychological essentialism and define it as people's beliefs that some essence makes a thing what it is. They suggest that people's belief in ultimate causes or essences is so strong that in the absence of specific knowledge, a belief in an unknown essence may serve as a structural placehoMer in the core of a concept. Gelman and Coley similarly argue that the structural role of theories in concepts is not dependent on their being accurate; for example, " ' . . . although the content of the dinosaur category probably varies between expert and novice, the function remains the same, and most likely both novice and expert would expect deep, non-obvious similarities among dinosaurs" (Gelman & Coley, 1991, p. 155). In sum, the currently prevalent view of concepts arranges the knowledge that constitutes a concept from superficial properties to deep or core properties.

116

Susan S. Jones and Linda B. Smith

Perceptual properties are at the surface or periphery of concepts. They are understood by people to be merely a rough guide to identifying the instances of a concept. Surface similarities are fallible guides to category membership because they are accidental and unstable. In contrast, deep or core properties of concepts are causal and stable. Deep properties are invariably nonperceptual properties. Deeper properties are the causal forces behind the more superficial characteristics of category members, including their perceptual appearances. The deepest core properties may include properties essential to category membership: that is, properties believed by people to be both necessary and sufficient for category membership, and thus the ultimate determiners of concept extension. N O N P E R C E P T U A L P R O P E R T I E S IN C H I L D R E N ' S C O N C E P T S The idea that concepts are fundamentally and most importantly nonperceptual is illustrated in two highly influential programs of research--those of Gelman (e.g., Davidson & Gelman, 1990; Gelman & Coley, 1991: Gelman & Markman, 1986, 1987) and Keil (1989). Gelman's research on children's category-based inductions is concerned with the role of concepts in the generalization of properties from one object to another: for example, generalizing the property "barks" from one barking dog to dogs in general. The major question in this work is whether inductions are made on the basis of the surface similarities between objects or via the represented concept. Having experienced one dog barking, do we infer that a second dog is likely to bark because the two dogs are perceptually similar or because they belong to the same category'? Gelman and Markman (1986, 1987) address this question by pitting the surface similarities among objects against shared category membership as possible bases for children's inferences that two objects share some property that is not itself directly perceived. In these studies, children are presented with familiar objects that are or are not in the same category (i.e., that have the same or different names) and that are or are not perceptually similar. For example, as illustrated in Figure 1, Gelman and Markman (1987) presented children with a drawing of a brown snake (representing the target category "snake"); a brown worn1 (a perceptually similar object but a different category); another, cobra-like snake (an object perceptually different from, but belonging to the same category as the brown snake): and a cow (an object that differs from the brown snake both in category and in appearance.) Children were given the familiar name of the target, and a novel, hidden property (e.g., "See this snake'?" referring to the picture of the brown snake; "This snake lays eggs."). The children were then asked whether each of the other named objects shared the property (e.g., "Do you think this worm lays eggs, like this snake'?.... Do you think this snake [the cobra] lays eggs, like this [brown] snake?" Gelman & Markman, 1987).

Perception and Concepts

117

TARGET PICTURE

snake

TEST ITEMS

,,APPEARANCE
SIMILAR DISSIMILAR

SAME CATEGORY

snake

snake

NAME

worm

cow

Figure I. Example of the stimulus sets used by Gelman & Markman (1987). Redrawn from copies of original stimulus pictures, courtesy of S. Gelman.

In this task, children made inductions--that is, generalized the p r o p e r t y - primarily to objects that they were told were members of the same category. The children were not seduced by the perceptual similarities among the pictures into inferring that the objects that were similar in appearance shared deep properties like egg-laying as well as surface similarities. In a modified version of the task, children as young as 2t/_ years of age generalized properties across objects with the same name rather than across objects with similar appearances (Gelman & Coley, 1990). Thus, the concept structures that support inductions develop at an early age.

118

Susan S. Jones and Linda B. Smith

Children's inductions are consistent with both a weak and a strong interpretation of children's knowledge of the perceptual and nonperceptual properties of objects. The weak interpretation is that young children's knowledge consists of more than perceptual information. What is the knowledge that is "more" than perception? First and most obviously, children know that objects have nonobvious as well as perceptual properties, and that objects in the same category are likely to share nonobvious properties. That children know these things is incontestible given the research results. The design of the induction experiments--the pitting of surface similarities against category n a m e s - - p u s h e s for a stronger interpretation in which category membership is placed in opposition to the perceptual properties of objects. The stronger interpretation is that " . . . children realize that category membership can be more important than perceptual cues in their inductive inferences" (Davidson & Gelman, 1990, p. 152). The very formulation of the empirical question-are inductions based on similarity or on category m e m b e r s h i p I i s predicated on a view of concepts in which the two kinds of information are distinct and dissociable. The idea that category membership is determined, not by perceptual properties (which are at best only rough guides), but rather by more central nonperceptual information is seen clearly in Keil's (1989) work on the effects of appearance transformation on the judged identities of objects. Keil presented children with vignettes such as the following: There are animals that live out on a farm near Dryden and they look just like this (picture of raccoon). They prowl around houses a lot and sometimes eat garbage and they like to wash their food in streams. Well. some scientists went and studied these animals very carefully with microscopes and other sorts of stuff, and when they looked at them and their insides they found out they weren't like most raccoons at all. The scientists found out they had the blood of skunks, the bones of skunks, the brains of skunks, and all the other inside parts of skunks rather than those of raccoons. And they found out that these animals' mommies and daddies were skunks and that when they had babies their babies were skunks. So their mommies and daddies look just like this (picture of skunk) and their babies look just like this (picture of skunk). What do you think these really are, raccoons or skunks'?" (Keil, 1989, p. 184) Older and sometimes even younger children maintain that the objects that look like raccoons are really skunks. Such results have been developmentally quite important because they show that children think as well as perceive. However, these results have also been taken to show that people including children understand that category membership is ultimately and finally determined by properties that cannot be directly perceived.

Perception and Concepts

119

HOW GOOD IS THE E M P I R I C A L EVIDENCE FOR A NONPERCEPTUAL CORE? Research like that of Gelman and Keil reflects substantial changes in the study of concepts and conceptual knowledge, wherein the field has moved away from a focus on the learning of simple classifications of geometric stimuli to the much more productive study of the nature of real-world concepts in all their complexity. The research shows that concepts are comprised of both nonperceptual and perceptual knowledge. We do not take issue with these contributions. We do disagree, however, with the claim that nonperceptual knowledge is more central to concepts and more critical to category membership than perception is, and with the view that perception is at best a rough guide.

What do Studies of Category-Based Inductions Show? Although induction studies are designed to pit perceptual properties and category membership against each other and seem to show category membership as distinct from and more important than surface similarity, we do not believe that these studies provide empirical evidence for this conclusion. The induction task was designed to pit nonperceptual category knowledge against perceptual similarity, but it does not adequately do so because the stimuli do not present the kind of perceptual information critical to concept formation and use. In these studies, same category is operationalized as "having the same name." The categories represented by the names are explicitly chosen to be familiar to the children. Names like "cat" and "skunk" label categories about which children have a great deal of conceptual knowledge, including knowledge of the usual appearance of concept exemplars. The names are thus chosen to fit children's established knowledge. The surface similarities of potential category members are operationalized by the similarities between colored line drawings. In marked contrast to the experimenter-presented "category" information, the experimenterpresented "perceptual" information is deeply impoverished, and violates what children know about the perceptual properties of category members. Thus, these studies do not pit nonperceptual information against relevant perceptual information. What these studies actually do is present children with two symbolic cues to the concept the experimenter has in mind. One cue--the name--is a good One. The second cue--the line drawing--is a very poor one relative to the perceptual information offered by objects in the real world. If children know, for example, what worms and snakes look like, then they know that the line drawings are not good representations of either worms or snakes. These distortions--the use of drawings that are perceptually ambiguous to both adults and children--are required by the experimental design because in most real categories, most instances are highly similar. In the real world, perception is a good guide to what objects are. This fact alone should make us think twice

120

Susan S. Jones and Linda B. Smith

about all experimental tasks in which objects' appearances are deliberately distorted to be misleading. The fact that induction-task stimuli bear little surface similarity to real objects also suggests that we should exercise caution in drawing inferences from children's non-use of perceptual properties in these studies about the place of perceptual properties in conceptual knowledge. The current theoretical view of concepts in which perception is contrasted with nonperceptual properties promotes research designs that preclude the discovery of the possible importance of perceptual information. An example is a recent study by Farrar, Raney, and Boyer (1992). In an induction experiment, these researchers used exacth, the same drawing to represent two different concepts. Thus, children were shown a line drawing of an elephant and told it was an elephant; they were shown a duplicate of the same drawing, and told that this object was a hippopotamus. They were also shown a different elephant and told that it was an elephant. The question in this experiment was whether children would generalize a trait from the elephant called "elephant" to the perceptually different elephant called "'elephant" or to the absolutely identical elephant called "'hippopotamus." Children younger than age 8 generalized the trait across perceptually identical pictures, whereas children above age 8 generalized by same name. These results may tell us more about developmental trends in playing verbal games than about the structure of concepts. They surely cannot tell us about the role of perceptual experience in the formation, growth, and use of concepts.

Identity in the Face of Transformation We also find that evidence such as Keil's does not compel a view of concepts in which perception is peripheral. In the example from Keil (1989) we cited earlier, an animal clearly pictured as a raccoon was said by the experimenter to have skunk parents and offspring, and skunk blood, bones, and brain. Children maintained that this object with the outward appearance of a raccoon was nonetheless a skunk. These findings seem to suggest that nonperceptual properties are more central than perceptual properties. That conclusion, however, is not justified by such evidence. Before we can conclude that perceptual inlbrmation is less important than nonperceptual information, we need a "psychophysics" of the two kinds of information. Children's judgments in this task may well depend on the relative amounts of perceptual and nonperceptual information given. If we decreased the amount of nonperceptual similarity, for example, noting only that these creatures had the blood of skunks but nothing else skunk-like, would children's judgments remain the same? Or if we decreased the relative amount of perceptual similarity--if instead of contrasting skunks and raccoons which are very similar in appearance, we presented children with a goldfish that gave birth to s k u n k s I w o u l d children still ignore the perceptual information? Before we draw conclusions about the relative im-

Perception and Concepts

121

portance of perceptual and nonperceptual information in category formation and in judgments o f category membership, we must go beyond mere demonstration to systematic manipulation of the relative availability of these two kinds o f information. We see here a general problem with current research on the nonperceptual nature o f concepts: the lack of any systematic examination or manipulation of perceptual information. The lack of attention to the role of perception in conceptual judgments is also apparent in Rips' studies of adults' judgments of similarity and category membership in the face of transforming events. Rips concludes from these studies that surface similarities " . . . simply are not important in determining the instance's category membership" (Rips, 1989, p. 51). However, in our view, the role of surface similarities has not been investigated in these studies. For example, in one study, Rips (1989) presented subjects with verbal descriptions o f the perceptual properties of a category instance and then a verbal description o f some transformation in those perceptual properties. In the accident condition, the story described the instance as undergoing some catastrophe that caused many of its surface properties to resemble those of another specific category. One typical story, o f a bird who became insect-like, ran as follows:

There was an animal called a sorp which, when it was fully grown, was like other sorps, having a diet which consisted of seeds and berries found on the ground or on plants. The sorp had two wings, two legs, and lived in a nest high in the branches of a tree. Its nest was composed of twigs and other fibrous plant material. This sorp was covered with bluish-gray feathers. The sorp's nest happened to be not too far from a place where hazardous chemicals were buried. The chemicals contaminated the vegetation that the sorp ate, and as time went by it gradually began to change. The sorp shed its feathers and sprouted a new set of wings composed of a transparent membrane. The sorp abandoned its nest, developed a brittle irridescent outer shell and grew two more pairs of legs. At the tip of each of the sorp's six legs an adhesive pad was fomaed so that it was able to hold onto smooth surfaces; for example, the sorp learned to take shelter during rainstorms by clinging upside down to the undersides of tree leaves. The sorp eventually sustained itself entirely on the nectar of flowers. Eventually this sorp mated with a normal female sorp one spring. The female laid the fertilized eggs in her nest and incubated them for three weeks. After that time normal young sorps broke out of their shells." (Rips, 1989, p. 39)

The subjects were asked to rate whether the instance was more likely to be a bird or an insect; and whether it was more similar to a bird or an insect. Subjects' judgments of similarity and category membership differed. The bird transformed to be insect-like was rated as a member of the category bird, but was rated as similar to an insect. Rips concludes from these results that similarity and eatego-

122

Susan S. Jones and Linda B. Smith

rization are independent relations in the sense that experimental manipulations affect them differentia.lly. In particular, he argues from the results in the accident condition for a dissociation between what an object is judged to look like and what an object "really" is. We find these results interesting because they suggest that adults use different information about categories in different tasks--a conclusion to which we will return. However, in our view these results have nothing whatever to say about the role of perception in concepts. The descriptions that provided "appearance" information were not perceptual; they were verbal. Perceiving objects and listening to descriptions of them may well yield different results. For example, if we presented subjects with a real bird and a real dragonfly and told them the story, what would their judgments be? It seems to us that subjects would be likely to assume that these were not the objects described in the story, or that the experimenter was lying about the transformed sorp having successfully mated with a normal sorp. This is an important point that is not easily reconciled with the view that nonperceptual information is the ultimate determiner of category membership. Real perceptual information is the basis for judgments of truth and falsity--for determining the veracity of the storyteiler's tale about sorps. People may have beliefs about nonobvious properties and causes, but they also have beliefs about the ultimate perceptual verifiability of those nonobvious causes. The web of interrelated ideas must make contact with (and be testable through) directly perceivable events, or else it is nonsense, religion, or magic. Knowledge--in lay concepts and in science--is grounded in the empirical data of perception.

T H E S H A P E BIAS IN L E X I C A L C O N C E P T FORMATION In this section, we present evidence on the development of children's interpretations of novel words. These interpretations are highly systematic. Indeed, the evidence suggests that children have knowledge about the kinds of properties that members of the same category are likely to share and that this knowledge is rich in interactions between perceptual properties, conceptual properties, and the syntactic properties of language. In our initial discussion of these results, we will use the language used by researchers under the consensual view of concepts: language such as "beliefs" and "expectations." However, we will put these terms in quotes, because we are not convinced that such propositional representations are the mechanisms behind these results. Overall the results show that: (a) children "expect" objects that are in the same lexical category to share particular perceptual properties, (b) the modulation of these expectations by context increases with age, (c) the kind of context that matters is both perceptual and nonperceptual, and (d) the perceptual properties that matter are ones that are highly relevant to causal beliefs about objects and their origins.

Perception and Concepts

123

The typical study of novel word interpretation consists of presenting children with a novel three-dimensional object, naming it with a novel name, and then asking what other objects are called by this name. Landau, Smith, and Jones (1988) conducted the original study and showed that children interpreted novel count nouns as referring to categories organized by shape. The magnitude of this effect was quite dramatic. In a control task in which the children were simply asked whether one object was like another object, they did not attend to the shapes of the objects more than to their textures or sizes. Indeed, similarity judgments were controlled by the magnitude of overall difference with no one dimension showing precedence. However, when the task was to generalize a novel name, the children attended exclusively to shape, ignoring quite large differences on the other dimensions. For example, given a 2 in wooden object that was called "a dax," the children called sponges, wire screens, and objects over I00 times larger "daxes" as long as these objects were the same shape as the exemplar dax. These results are consistent with the idea that children "believe" members of the same category should have the same shape. Subsequent studies have shown that the shape bias changes with development, becoming more robust, more specific to count nouns, and less exclusive in children's novel word interpretations. Overall, the results from a variety of studies suggest the developmental trend shown in Figure 2 (p. 124). This figure shows the degree to which children attend to shape as a function of age in five task contexts: (a) interpreting a novel count noun, (b) interpreting a novel count noun in the context of objects with eyes, (c) interpreting a novel adjective, (d) interpreting a novel adjective when a property other than shape is highly salient ("adjective-glitter"), and (e) making similarity judgments. The developmental origins of the shape bias were investigated in a longitudinal study of 16- to 24-month-olds by Jones, Smith, Landau, and GershkoffStowe (1992). They found that a shape bias in interpreting novel count nouns appeared around 18 months of age. The shape bias emerged in individual children when they possessed more than 50 object names in their productive vocabularies. Results from that study also suggest that for a brief period following its appearance, the shape bias is not specifically lexical; in the course of learning object names, attention to shape increases in both naming and nonnaming contexts. However, the shape bias rapidly becomes specific to novel word interpretat i o n s - t h o u g h initially not to novel count nouns. Thirty-six-month-old children attend to shape in the context of a novel adjective as well as a novel count noun. However, if some other property is made much more salient than shape, 36month-olds attend to that other salient property in the context of an adjective, but continue to attend to shape in the context of a novel count noun (Smith, Jones, & Landau, 1992). By the time children are 5 years of age, novel adjectives systematically direct attention away from shape (Landau, Smith, & Jones, 1992). Jones, Smith, and Landau (1991) found that it was not only linguistic context that modulated the perceptual properties that children "expected" members of the

124

Susan S. Jones and Linda B. Smith

COUNT NOUN

uJ < "I" 0 I-Z

z

I 12

I 24 APPROXIHATE

t 36 A6E

i 48

i 60

(HONTHS)

Figure 2. ]'he development of context-dependency in the shape bias. Data from several studies show changes with age and context in children's reliance on shape for interpreting new words (novel count nouns; novel count nouns for objects with eyes; novel adjectives; novel adjectives when a property other than shape is made salient) and for making similarity judgements.

same category to share. They found that 24- and 36-month-old children interpreted novel names for objects with and without eyes in fundanlentally different ways, attending to shape and te.rture when the objects had eyes and to shape alone when these same objects did not have eyes. Comments made by the children (e.g., "night-night baby dax") indicated that the perceptual property of eyes activated children's knowledge of animate objects. Presumably, children "believe" that categories of animate objects share particular kinds of perceptual properties--in particular, textural information about substance. The perceptual cue of eyes in the context of naming recruited that preexisting knowledge. Eyes are a "conceptually-laden" perceptual property: their effect on children's "expectations" about the shared properties of objects with the same name suggests the potential importance of relationships between naming and perception in the further development of concepts. Soja, Carey, and Spelke (1991) have also reported results showing that the perceptual properties that modulate novel word interpretations in children are perceptual properties likely to drive conceptual development generally. Soja and her colleagues examined 2-year-olds' interpretations of count and mass nouns

Perception and Concepls

125

labeling concrete objects and substances (e.g., mounds of hand cream mixed with gravel). These very young children showed no sensitivity to the count noun-mass noun syntactic distinction, but they were highly sensitive to whether or not there was a novel word to be interpreted and to the different perceptual properties of concrete objects and substances. A novel word (either count noun or mass noun) directed children's attention to different perceptual properties for different kinds of objects--to shape and number for grouping rigid objects and to texture and color for grouping substances. In the similarity task in which there were no novel names to interpret, children did not attend to different properties for concrete objects versus substances. Put another way, children's groupings-their demonstration of their knowledge of objects versus substances as distinct kinds--depended on the joint effects of a novel word and the perceptual properties that distinguish rigid objects and substances. In summary, research on the shape bias presents a picture of how various kinds of knowledge may interact in concept development and use. In these studies we see existing knowledge directing immediate perception, perception recruiting existing object knowledge, language recruiting and being recruited by both--and all of these interactions increasing with age. The shape bias is clearly not just about perception: It is about how perception is a central and integrated part of naming, categorization, and conceptual knowledge. FROM PERCEPTION TO CONCEPTION? In all the experiments on novel word interpretations, there is a dramatic contrast between the perceptual properties of objects that children attend to when naming objects versus when making other kinds of judgments (e.g., similarity). These results might be taken as indicating that children have "expectations" and "beliefs" about the kinds of "surface similarities" that members of the same category share. In this way, studies of the shape bias seem rather like studies of categorybased induction in children. In both cases, experimenters name objects to indicate a category, and from children's responses--what other objects they judge to have the same name or what other objects they judge to have the same hidden property--inferences can be made about the nature of children's underlying concepts. Following this reasoning, children's novel word interpretations suggest that perceptual properties are key players in evolving concepts. But the prevailing view of concepts, and an uncritical consideration of results in induction studies, suggest that concepts are principally and most importantly not about surface similarities. One might attempt to reconcile the shape bias findings with the prevailing view of concepts by proposing that concepts are constructed from the outside in--from perception to conception. In this view, shape-bias studies provide information about the earlier stages in the formation of a given concept, whereas induction studies provide information about children's already established con-

126

Susan S. Jones and Linda B. Smith

cepts. The move from the outside and reliance on perception, to the inner core and reliance on deep, nonobvious properties would emerge as children learned more about the individual concept. Thus, early in the formation of a concept, children would use "expectations" about perceptual similarities rather than "expectations" about nonobvious similarities as the basis for their inductions. By this view, then, children's categories in novel word interpretation tasks might be regarded as "proto-categories," lacking the nonperceptual knowledge that structures a mature concept. This proposal is consistent with Davidson and Gelman's (1990) finding that children made inductions among perceptually similar objects when the objects and categories were novel, and with the idea of a "perceptionto-conception shift" in the development of individual concepts and in cognitive development more generally. Such a trend has been repeatedly suggested by developmentalists (e.g., Flavell, 1970; Keil, 1989; Piaget, 1929; Vygotsky, 1934/1962) and although there is probably some truth to it, the truth is not a simple one of perception giving way to conception. There are three problems with the specific idea that the importance of perceptual properties in children's novel word interpretations is characteristic only of immature concepts. The first problem is that children's knowledge about perceptual properties, naming, and categorization does not look like primitive knowledge. The development of the shape bias reflects growth in knowledge about the semantic force of syntactic form categories, about ontological kinds of categories, and about the significance of specific correlations that may exist between perceptual features. The second problem with the perception-to-conception view is that the shape bias is not simply a starting bias. It is not replaced. The empirical studies repeatedly show that the shape bias in interpreting novel count nouns is stronger for adults than for children. Adult naming at the basic noun level often ignores deep, nonobvious similarities while respecting shape similarities. Thus, a mechanical monkey and a real monkey are both called "monkey"; a television is familiarly known as "the box"; a grizzly bear and stuffed toy bear are both called "bear." One might counterargue that the shape bias in adults only shows that naming serves two distinct functions, directing attention sometimes to appearances and at other times to the conceptual core. We will consider this argument briefly after all three problems have been presented. The third problem is that perceptual and nonperceptual knowledge do not play distinct roles in our concepts. Surface appearances, just like nonperceptual properties, support theoretical relations within and among different bits of knowledge. The marsupial mouse, which figures in discussions by Quine (1969) and by Gelman and Coley ( ! 99 I), offers an example of how names, deep properties, and perceptual appearances are all highly interconnected. Appearances matter for both naming and for our "theories" about marsupial mice. We call the marsupial mouse--which is not actually a rodent--"mouse" because it strongly resembles a mouse. However, the surface appearance is also relevant to our understanding

Perception and Concepts

127

of the causal forces involved in determining the marsupial mouse's ecological niche. The causal relatedness between deep and surface properties is not just from inside to out, but goes in both directions. In our understanding of why marsupial mice reproduce the way they do, we can conceptualize causal forces from nonobvious internal properties of the mice to their surface characteristics; but we can also conceptualize causal forces from surface appearances of mice and environments over evolutionary time to the nonobvious properties inside (see Murphy, in press, for a related discussion). In summary, we argue that the kind of knowledge that manifests itself in the shape bias is not a set of general, default options that are only seen when welldeveloped category knowledge is lacking. This characterization is wrong on three grounds. First, the shape bias is about category knowledge. Second, knowledge about the relations between perceptual properties and what a thing is to be called is not replaced in development, but enriched and elaborated and used throughout life. Third, both perceptual and nonperceptual object properties enter into bidirectional relations with one another and with other constituents of general world knowledge.

What has Naming Got to Do with Concepts and Categories? We now return to the question of whether naming can play two distinct roles in categorization, taking attention sometimes to the appearances of things and sometimes to their nonperceptual properties. Findings from studies of inductions, of judgments of category membership under transformations, and of the shape bias all reflect children's interpretations of the implications of "having the same name." The findings suggest that same name in shape-bias studies implies having the same shape; that same name in induction studies implies sharing the nonobvious properties that determine category membership; and that same name in transformation studies implies same essence. The evidence is strong that same name at times implies each of these similarities, even though the first implication may sometimes be in conflict with the other two. Because things in the same category usually look alike, naming may usually take attention to either appearances or nonperceptual properties with the same result. Conflict, and thus evidence for the different roles of naming, can arise only in cases where objects are perceptually similar but have important nonperceptual differences. Landau, Smith, and Jones (1988) discussed such a case, first reported by Carey (1985). They wrote that
relations beyond "'mere appearance" . . . must ultimately figure in children's and adults' understanding. There are compelling logical arguments . . . and empirical demonstrations of this point. For example, older preschoolers consider mechanical and real monkeys to look alike, but they judge real monkeys and snakes to have similar insides . . . This evidence shows that nonperceptual factors are important

128

Susan S. Jones and Linda B. Smith

in the representation o1' concepts. Such evidence does not, however, imply that perceptual similarities are not also important, indeed, for the lmq~ose of lmmiltg objects, perceptual similarity would sometimes seem to be more critical than "deeper" similarities. Children and adults may know that a real monkey and a snake have the same insides, but both children and adults call the real numkev aml the mechanical mtmk O' by the same name. (Landau ct al.. 1988. p. 300) Thus, Landau et al. emphasized the fact that naming may highlight similarities in appearance while ignoring nonperceptual differences--even nonperceptual differences as conceptually important as the ontological differences between real and mechanical monkeys. In a recent article, Soja, Carey, and Spelke (1991) take issue with tile proposal that naming may ignore ontological boundaries in order to capture perceptual similarities. Soja et al. argue that even young children's novel word interpretations retlect prelinguistic ontological commitments. Where naming seems to violate such distinctions, the violations are more apparent than real. For exampie, Landau et al. (1988) had suggested that we call real bears and toy bears "bears" to capture the similarities in appearance between the two kinds of objects. Soja et al. (1991) propose instead that "bear: living understood from context" and "'bear: toy understood from context" are actually two different names for two distinct ontological kinds. By this view, the two uses of the word "'bear" are homonyms rather than synonyms, and in this and similar cases, naming honors "deep" conceptual knowledge of ontological kind. We are not convinced. What is a toy bear if not a bear'? It is a toy, but that is like saying that a living bear is an animal. If we ask what kind of toy it is, there is only one answer: It is a bear. For the purposes of naming, living bears and toy bears are the same in important ways. For the purposes of hugging (or being hugged) they are not the same. But the psychological fact is that people have no trouble using the same name to refer to objects with similar shape characteristics. And when people call a toy bear a "bear," it seems to us they mean exactly what they say. In truth, we're faced with two pieces of conflicting evidence. A toy bear is called bear. However, a toy bear is also judged not to be a real bear, despite its bear-like appearance. Which piece of data reveals the true structure of the human concept of bear'? By arguing that naming captures ontological kinds rather than perceptual similarities, Soja et al. (1991) argue against the idea, implied by the shape-bias data, that naming evokes different kinds of knowledge in different task contexts. Thus, this argument supports the claim that names are properties of concepts and in particular, that names are interrelated with other nonperceptual properties at the stable cores of concepts. A single place tbr names in concepts is to be e x p e c t e d i e v e n insisted u p o n - - i f concepts have structure and if that structure is stable over time.

Perception and Concepts

129

DO C O N C E P T S HAVE A S T R U C T U R E ? In the standard view of cognition, concepts are representations; they are mental things such as lists of propositions. Thus, within this view it is proper to talk about the structure of concepts in terms of sets of beliefs, expectations, and commitments to ontology. In this view, concepts are inherently static. Arguments that the conceptual core consists of an unchanging belief (such as a belief in an unknown essence) are motivated in part by the search for the stable components of concepts. Arguments that naming cannot violate ontological boundaries are arguments predicated on the assumption of stable and logically consistent representations. Such assumptions make it difficult to incorporate similarity in appearances into concept structures. Perceptual similarity is inherently changeable; the surface similarities that we attend to move about radically from task to task (Goodman, 1972; Medin, Goldstone, & Gentner, in press; Smith & Heise, in press). For example, whether kittens are more like lions or more like puppies depends on the task context. Furthermore, similarity judgments are not logical (Tversky, 1977). Thus, a kitten may be more similar to a lion than a lion is to a kitten. Everything we know about similarity judgments suggests that our perception of surface similarities is inherently unstable. Similarity is context dependent and computed on-line. We have here two proposals: (a) Concepts consist of stable representations; and (b) perceptual similarity is inherently unstable. If we accept both, then we must conclude that perceptual similarity is not part of stable concept representations (Mcdin & Ortony, 1989). The proposal that perceptual similarity is unstable is based on data and therefore cannot be rejected. But the proposal that concepts are static and thing-like is a theoretical assumption and is thus open to question. Barsalou (1989) has argued that concepts, like perceptual similarities, are inherently unstable. In several empirical studies, he has demonstrated that certain knowledge about a category becomes active only in certain contexts. For example, when people read the word "'frog" in isolation, the idea "eaten by humans" is not activated. But when the word "frog" is read in the context of a french restaurant, "eaten by humans" is activated. Barsalou (1987) has also shown that people can readily create special purpose, ad hoc categories--categories such as "all the things on my desk that can be used to pound in a nail." Such categories show the same pei'formance characteristics as established concepts in a variety of tasks such as typically judgments, category membership judgments, and property generation. These results suggest that there may be no difference between presumably represented categories, like "frog," and concepts computed on-line in a specific task. Both may be unstable. Medin and Ortony (1989) argue that although Barsalou's data show a great deal of knowledge instability, they do not show instability at the core of represented concepts. They write:

130

Susan S. Jones and Linda B. Smith

we thi,~k care has to be taken not to equate instability in outputs or behaviors with underlying or internal instability. Might it bc that our uudcrlying concepts arc in fact stable (whatever that might mean) and that the apparent instability is an artifact of the processes that operate on these stable rcpresent'ltions'? Given our IYanlcwork, we would argue that the deeper one goes the more stability one ought tO find. St'}, if we were to ask 200 people on 10 different occasions in 10 different contexts whether dogs arc more likely to give birth to puppies than to kittens, we would find remarkable stability . . . One might claim that Barsalou is exploring only the fringes of conceptual use while ignoring the huge qu:mtities of knowledge that are so stable we arc scarcely awarc tlf them. (Media & Ortony. 1989, p. 191-192) Wc arc not persuaded by this argument. Although there might be great reliability in pcoplc's answer to one particular question, this may only mean that they reliably compute on-line the same answer in the same task cot~te.vt. People may nonetheless compute very different aspects of dogs in different contexts. Thcrc may be no always-activated core meaning for any concept no matter how rich our knowledgc,

EMERGENT CATEGORIES
We pursue the idea of concepts computcd on-line by t'il~t returning to the findings on how children use multiple sources of information in context to determine the likely meaning of a novel word. These data specifically suggest that there is a dynamic perceptual similarity space. Wc then extend thcsc ideas to suggest a view of concepts in which various kinds of category p c r f o r m a n e e s I j u d g m e n t s of essences, inductions, n a m i n g i a r e assembled in context. By this view, none of these perlbrmanccs provides a privileged window on the "structure" of concepts because concepts have no constant structure, but are instead continually created. There is, in brief, a dynamic conceptual space of which the dynamic similarity space is part.

A Dynamic Similarity Space

A c o m m o n convention for representing tile perceptual similarity between any two objects is the distance between objects in a multidimensional space (c.g., Nosofsky, 1986; Shepard, 1964; Smith, 1993; Smith & Heise, 1993). Thus, the similarities between red and blue squares :rod red and blue triangles may bc represented as in Figure 3. Change in the perceived similarity of objects with changes in selective attention can be represented by stretching the similarity space. For example, if an individual selectively zlttends to shape more than color, the space is stretched such that the distance between objects on the shape dimension increases and such that the distance between the objects on the color dimension decreases. The change in the similarity space as a result of selective attention to shape is represented in the change from Figure 3A to Figure 3B. If an

(B)

Figure 3. (A) Locations of red and blue triangles and circles in a hypothetical twodimensional (Color Shape) similarity space. (B) Increased attention to shape stretches the similarity space on the shape dimension, simultaneously shrinking the space on the color dimension. (C) Perfect selective attention to shape shrinks the similarity space on the color dimension to the width of a single point. Thus, objects that are the same shape occupy the same place in the similarity space regardless of their colors.

131

132

Susan S. Jones and Linda B. Smith

individual selectively attends to shape perfectly (that is, if all information about color is gated out), the perceived similarities are represented by a stretching of the space such that it becomes a single dimensional line: Objects of the same shape fall on top of each other, as in Figure 3C. If we use this convention to represent the findings in the shape-bias experiments, we find a dynamic similarity space. Figure 4A represents the similarity of four objects from the original Landau et al. (1988) experinaent for a 3-year-old in the No Name similarity condition--the condition in which magnitude of difference matters but specific dinaensions of difference do not. Figure 4B represents the similarity of the same objects in the Name condition--the condition in which the exemplar is named by a novel count noun. The data indicate that perceived similarity changes between the No Name and Name conditions; the space is stretched along the shape dimension and shrunk along the size and texture dimensions. Figure 4C represents the perceived similarities of objects with eyes in the Name condition of Jones et al. (1991). The addition of eyes in the context of naming causes a stretching along the texture dimension as well as along the shape dimension. The results suggest a similarity space that is continually changing-continually adjusting itself to fit what has been said and the perceptual properties of the objects to which the child is attending. The evidence on the development of the shape bias suggests that the dynamics of the similarity space both change and increase as the child learns to represent the regularities that exist between how words are used, the co-occurrences of properties in objects, and the act of attending to particular properties. Learning these things makes the similarity space more dynamic, more context dependent, and more intelligent. Learned relations between words and the properties of objects represent one kind of force on the perceived similarity of objects. There are other forces on attention whose effects may be not be learned and may be specific to the particular sets of objects and the particular context. For example, Smith et al. (1992) heightened the salience of the glitter covering objects by presenting the objects in the dark under a beam of light. The result was that glitter-covered objects glowed and twinkled. This context-specific effect--though most likely an unlearned effect and one that in its specific operations may be nongeneral--is nonetheless theoretically important. A beam of light on glitter-covered objects proved to have a powerful effect but not one that by itself controlled perceived similarity. Instead, the unlearned and situation-specific effect of light on glitter combined with the learned effects of the relation between syntactic frame and attention. Children attended to glitter in the context of a novel adjective and light, but not in the context of a novel adjective and normal room illumination; and they never attended to glitter in the context of a novel noun. Figure 5 (p. 135) summarizes the findings of Smith et al. in terms of the stretching and shrinking of the similarity space and captures how the perceived similarity of objects emerges in the synergetic actions of syntactic frame, the properties of objects, and the situation-specific effect of a beam of light.

/ (A)

fl::

l~gure 4. Theoretical representations of how the perceived similarity between stimuli in the three-dimensional space of shape, texture, and color changed as a function of condition in Jones et al. (1991). (A) Similarity instructions, no eyes. (B) Novel noun interpretation, no eyes. (C) Novel noun interpretation, eyes.

133

134

Susan S. Jones and Linda B. Smith

This idea--that the perceived similarity of objects emerges in context from synergistic effects of multiple learned and unlearned forces--does not mean that the perceived similarity of objects is so context dependent, variable, and nonstable as to be useless and a source of noise in the system. The suggestion that the similarity space becomes more dynamic with development does not mean that important cross-situation consistencies do not emerge with development. Our proposal is quite the opposite. The intelligence of perceived similarity accrues precisely because it is variable and dependent on context. The intelligence is in the systematic nature of variability and its dependence on the regularities that exist between language and the properties of objects. Moreover, perceptual similarity may often be dynamically stable across contexts. In the Smith et al. (1992) experiment, the beam of light on glitter in the context of a novel word in an adjectival frame shifted attention dramatically from one property (shape) to another (coloration). However, the beam of light in the context of a novel count noun did not shift attention away from shape. In the context of a novel count noun, the beam of light did not move attention at all. In our view, this is not because there is a privileged rule that makes the count-noun-to-shape effect immune to local contextual influences, but rather because the regularity that exists between count nouns and shape is pervasive. Thus, early in language development, the syntactic frame of a count noun becomes a strong force on attention. By age 3, attending to shape in the context of a count noun is a stable, robust, and highly replicable phenomenon because, as multiple forces compete and combine in directing attention, the force of a count noun is so strong that its influence is virtually always seen in performance. The critical lesson to be learned from these results is that the perceived similarity of objects is emergent and determined by the joint effects of multiple kinds of forces. By our account, the shape bias does not result from the learning of specific rules about what kinds of properties matter for what kind of syntactic frames. There is probably no represented rule that says "In the context of a count n o u n , attend to shape." Instead, the operation of attention appears as if there is a rule because the dynamics of the similarity space reflect the regularities that exist between the use of count nouns, the solidity of objects, and the relevance of shape. The dynamic nature of similarity--and the dependence of similarity o n multiple kinds of knowledge sources--enables children to make flexible use of anything they know in determining the likely meaning of a word in the context in which it is used. And it seems likely that the coalition of forces--both learned and unlearned--that directs children's attention (and presumably the speaker's as well) usually points in the right direction. This view of perceptual similarity as dynamically dependent on contextual and learned forces is consistent with most formal theoretical work on the nature of similarity (Gasser & Smith, 1991; Kruschke, 1990; Smith, 1993; Nosofsky, 1986; Shepard, 1964; Tversky, 1977). However, this view of similarity is not the o n e that has been influential among developmentalists concerned with concep-

51HILARITY
Dax: no beam A dax one: no beam
Exemplar Exemplar

NOUN

ADJECTI VE

Like: no beam

Exemplar

Like: beam
Exemplar

Dax: beam

A dax one: beam

Exemplar

Exemplar

Figure 5. Theoretical representations of how the perceived similarity between stimuli changed in the two-dimensional space of shape and coloration as a function of linguistic ("like"; "Dax"; "a dax one") and extralinguistic (beam of light; no beam) context in Experiments 2 and 3 of Smith et al. (1992).

136

Susan S, Iones and Linda B, Smith

tual development (see Smith & Heise, 1993). Rather, following the philosophical views of Quine (1960, 1969), perceptual similarity has been viewed as static and impenetrable by conceptual knowledge (e.g., Keil, 1989). In this view, perceptual similarity is something to be overcome, The evidence on the shape bias points to a conclusion quite the opposite of these: Pet~ceptual similarity is not static but dynamic; and it is by its very nature both infested with and the carrier of a great deal of knowledge. In short, we propose that all of the data are best accommodated by the view that children's interpretation of novel words is the emergent effect of multiple sources of information on the perceived similarity of objects. Even it"this view is accepted, some might argue that it is only about perception and naming and has little to do with the represented knowledge that is category knowledge. We have already seen the difficulties encountered in segregating perception from conception and in dismissing the evidence on the shape bias as irrelevant to developing category knowledge. We propose instead that the dynamics of pet,ceptual similarity offer a model for a dynamic "category space" of which the dynamic similarity space is one interacting part.

Dynamic Concepts
Our basic idea is this: Just as multiple forces--both learned forces that embody substantial conceptual knowledge and situation-specific forces that arise in the local context--cause the perceptual similarity of any two objects to be nonconstant; so also do learned and unlearned contextual force cause concepts to be nonconstant, By our view concepts arc not represented entities that exist as a unit, What we call "categories" and "concepts" are the emergent products of multiple knowledge sources in specific task contexts. By this view, there is no set intension (definition in the head) or extension (category in the world). Both are transient and emergent in the task at hand. Our proposal is best clarified by considering how we would explain developing perlbrmanees in various tasks involving naming and categories: novel word interpretation tasks, reasoning about essences, and induction tasks. As outlined earlier, we explain performance and developmental changes in performance in novel word extension tasks in terms of the synergistic operation of multiple knowledge sources and contextual effects on the similarity space. We explain how people reason about essences as another manifestation of the task-specific assembly of knowledge. Thus, when asked if some odd-looking object that was once a skunk is still really a skunk despite transformations, the adult might use his or her knowledge of "really," general knowledge of biology, knowledge of tall tales, and knowledge of the pragmatics of questions and psychology experiments to assemble an answer. Very little knowledge about skunks per se might be used in answering the question, In particular, the adult who maintained that a skunk is still g skunk despite transformations of its static perceptual properties need have no represented definition of skunk that states that

Perception and Concepts

137

an organism is a skunk if and only if it possesses some unknown skunk essence. Our general point is that judgments specific to this task may be assembled from multiple kinds of knowledge--perceptual, nonperceptual, linguistic, and perhaps social--just as readily as we assemble category structures such as "things on my desk that might be used to pound in a nail" (Barsalou, 1987). Developmental changes in children's tendency to preserve the "identity" of objects despite transformations in perceptual appearance (e.g., Keil, 1989), are explained not by changes in the kinds of represented category structures children possess, but by changes in their knowledge (linguistic, conceptual, and empirical knowledge about specific co-relations), and in the weights and influence given to particular kinds of knowledge in particular tasks. By this account then, "category structure" and developmental changes in categories both derive from the very same processes--that is, from the integration of multiple sources of information in particular task contexts. We explain the developmental evidence in induction studies in the same way that we explain the shape bias and reasoning about what individual objects "really ate." In an induction study, the child may draw on many kinds of taskrelevant information--familiar object names, the relationship between names and what things look like, knowledge of what objects with these names typically look like in the world, knowledge of pictures and how drawings can be symbols tbr things they do not look exactly like, the particular pictures, and the hidden property to be generalized from the exemplar to the test objects. By our account, children assemble a particular "category" to reason from that fits this task; and that assembly is based both on the knowledge acquired from lifetime experiences in the world and on the local task-specific influences.

CONCLUSION If a view of concepts as dynamic assemblies of knowledge is accepted as a serious alternative to the view of concepts as things with nonperceptual cores, then we must substantially shift the direction of empirical research. We cannot merely seek to demonstrate that very young children can ignore perceptual prop. erties or that they can follow experimenter-supplied names in category reasoning. We need to study how perceptual knowledge and conceptual knowledge come together in task 'contexts to yield specific performances. We need to vary--in serious and systematic ways--both the perceptual knowledge and the nonpercep.. tual knowledge available in a task in order to understand the mechanisms behind "category structures" as they emerge in particular perfom~ances. We need to study development and change in knowledge and the integration of knowledg~ sources. We believe that the current research on developmental changes in how syntactic frames and knowledge properties organize children's attention to the properties of objects and their interpretation of novel words provides a model for

138

Susan S. Jones and Linda B. Smith

the r e q u i r e d e m p i r i c a l r e s e a r c h , and a starting point for a r e c o n c e p t u a l i z a t i o n o f what d e v e l o p i n g c a t e g o r i e s are.

REFERENCES
Barsalou, L.W. (1987). The instability of graded structure: Implications for the nature of concepts. In U. Neisser (Ed.), Concepts and conceptual development: Ecological and intellectual factors in categorization (pp. 101-140). New York: Cambridge University Press. Barsalou, L.W. (1989). lntraconcept similarity and its implications for interconcept similarity. In S. Vosniadou & A. Ortony (Eds.), Similarity and analogical reasoning (pp. 76-121). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carey, S. (1985). Conceptual change in childhood. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Davidson, N.S., & Gelman, S.A. (I 990). Inductions from novel categories: The role of language and conceptual structure. Cognitive Development, 5. 15 I - 176. Farrar, M.J,, Raney, G.E., & Boycr, M.G. (1992). Knowledge, concepts, and inferences in childhood. Child Development, 63, 673-691. Flavell, J.H. (1970). Concept development. In P.H. Mussen (Ed.), Carmichaers manual of child psychology: VoL I. New York: Wiley. Gasser, M., & Smith, L.B. (1991). The development of a notion of sameness: A connectionist model. In Proceedings of the 13th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 719-723). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Gelman. S.A.. & Coley, J.D. (1990). The importance of knowing a Dodo is a bird: Categories and inferences in 2-year-old children. Developmental Psychology, 26, 796-804. Gelman. S.A., & Coley, J.D. ( 1991 ). Language and categorization: The acquisition of natural kind terms. In S.A. Gelman & J.P. Byrnes (Eds.), Perspectives on language and thought: Interrelations in development (pp. 146-196). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gelman, S.A., & Markman, E.M. (1986). Categories and induction in young children. Cognition, 23, 183-209. Gelman, S.A., & Markman, E.M. (1987). Young children's inductions from natural kinds: The role of categories and appearances. Child Development. 58. 1532-1541. Goodman, N. (1972). Problems and projects. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Jones, S.S., Smith, L.B., & Landau, B. (1991). Object properties and knowledge in early lexical learning. Child Development, 62, 499-516. Jones, S.S., Smith. L B . , Landau, B.. & Gershkoff-Stowe, L. (1992, October). The origins of the shape bias. Paper presented at the Boston Child Language Conference, Boston. Keil. F.C. (1989). Concepts. kinds, and cognitive development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kruschke, J. (1990). Alcove: A connectionist model of eategory learning. Research Report No. 19, Program in Cognitive Science, Indiana University, Bloomington. Landau. B., Jones. S.S., & Smith, L.B. (1992). Perception, ontology, and naming in young children: Commentary on Soja, Carey, and Spelke. Cognition, 43, 85-91. Landau, B., Smith, L.B., & Jones, S.S. (1988). The importance of shape in early lexical learning. Cognitive Development, 3, 299-321. Landau, B., Smith, L.B., & Jones, S.S. (1992). Syntactic context and the shape bias in children's and adults' lexical learning. Journal of Memor 3, & Language. 31, 807-825. Medin, D.L., Goldstone, R.L., & Gentner, D. (1993). Respects for similarity. PsychologicalReview, 100, 254-278 Medin, D., & Ortony, A. (1989). Psychological essentialism. In S. Vosniadou & A. Ortony (Eds.), Sbnilarity and analogical reasoning (pp. 179-195). New York: Cambridge University Press. Murphy, G. (in press). A rational theory of concepts, in G.V. Nakamura, R.M. Tarraban, & D.L.

Perception and Concepts

139

Medin (Eds.), The psychology of learning and motivation: Vol. 29. Categorization by humans and machines. Murphy, G., & Medin, D.L. (1985). The role of theories in conceptual coherence. Psychological Review, 92, 289-316. Nelson, K. (1973). Some evidence for the cognitive primacy of categorization and its functional basis. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 19, 21-39. Nelson, K. (1974). Concept, word, and sentence: Interrelations in acquisition and development. Psychological Review, 81, 267-285. Nosofsky, R.M. (1986). Attention, similarity, and the identification-categorization relationship. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 115, 39-57. Piaget, J. (1929). The child's conception of the world. New York: Harcourt Brace. Quine, W.V. (1960). Word and object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Quine, w.v. (1969). Natural kinds. In W.V. Quine, Ontological relativity and other essays (pp. 114138). New York: Columbia University Press. Rips, L.J. (1989). Similarity, typicality, and categorization. In S. Vosniadou & A. Ortony (Eds.), Similarity and analogy (pp. 21-59). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosch, E. (1978). Principles of categorization. In E. Rosch & B.B. Lloyd (Eds.), Cognition and categorization (pp. 28-49). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Shepard. R.W. (1964). Attention and the metric structure of the stimulus space. Journal of Mathematical P~(vchology, 1, 54-87. Smith, L.B. (1993). The concept of same. In H. Reese (Ed.), Advances in child development & Behavior (pp. 216-253). New York: Academic. Smith. L.B., & Heise, D. (1992). Perceptual similarity and conceptual structure. In B. Bums (Ed.), Advances in psychology-Percepts, concepts, and categories: The representation and processing of information (pp. 233-272). Amsterdam: Elsevier. Smith, L.B., Jones, S.S., & Landau, B. (1992). Count nouns, adjectives, and perceptual properties in children's novel word interpretations. Developmental Psychology, 28, 273-286. Soja, N., Carey, S., & Spelke, E. (1991). Ontological categories guide young children's inductions of word meanings: Object terms and substance terms. Cognition, 38, 179-211. Tversky, A. (1977). Features of similarity. Psychological Review, 84, 327-352. Vygotsky, L.S. (1962). Thought and language (E. Hanfmann & G. Vakar, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: M1T Press. (Original work published in 1934) Wisniewski, E.J., & Medin, D.L. (1991). Harpoons and long sticks: The interaction of theory and similarity in rule induction. In D.H. Fisher, M.J. Pazzani, & P. Langley (Eds.), Concept formation: Knowledge and experience in unsupervised learning. San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufman.