Combinatorics

Abstraction

Neuroscience

Feature (linguistics)

Mathematics

Categorization

Politics

Epistemology

Philosophy

Cognition

Political science

Cognitive psychology

Artificial intelligence

Psychology

Representation (politics)

Contrast (vision)

Computer science

Linguistics

Concept learning

Centrality

Object (grammar)

Communication

Mental representation

Memory & Cognition

Being white is central to whether we call an animal a "polar bear," but it is fairly peripheral to our concept of what apolar bear is. We propose that a feature is central to category naming in proportion to the feature's category validity—the probability of the feature, given the category. In contrast, a feature is conceptually central in a representation of the object to the extent that the feature is depended on by other features. Further, we propose that naming and conceptual centrality are more likely to disagree for features that hold at more specific levels (such asis white, which holds only for the specific category ofpolar bear) than for features that hold at intermediate levels of abstraction (such ashas claws, which holds for all bears). In support of these hypotheses, we report evidence that increasing the abstractness of category features has a greater effect on judgments of conceptual centrality than on judgments of name centrality and that other category features depend more on intermediate-level category features than on specific ones.

Feature centrality: Naming versus imagining