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Acquiring Contextualized Concepts: A Connectionist Approach
Author(s) -
van Dantzig Saskia,
Raffone Antonino,
Hommel Bernhard
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
cognitive science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.498
H-Index - 114
eISSN - 1551-6709
pISSN - 0364-0213
DOI - 10.1111/j.1551-6709.2011.01178.x
Subject(s) - connectionism , categorization , context (archaeology) , computer science , object (grammar) , feature (linguistics) , artificial intelligence , granularity , context model , natural language processing , artificial neural network , programming language , linguistics , paleontology , philosophy , biology
Conceptual knowledge is acquired through recurrent experiences, by extracting statistical regularities at different levels of granularity. At a fine level, patterns of feature co‐occurrence are categorized into objects. At a coarser level, patterns of concept co‐occurrence are categorized into contexts. We present and test CONCAT, a connectionist model that simultaneously learns to categorize objects and contexts. The model contains two hierarchically organized CALM modules (Murre, Phaf, & Wolters, 1992). The first module, the Object Module , forms object representations based on co‐occurrences between features. These representations are used as input for the second module, the Context Module , which categorizes contexts based on object co‐occurrences. Feedback connections from the Context Module to the Object Module send activation from the active context to those objects that frequently occur within this context. We demonstrate that context feedback contributes to the successful categorization of objects, especially when bottom‐up feature information is degraded or ambiguous.