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FREQUENCY, CONCEPTUAL STRUCTURE AND PATTERN RECOGNITION
Author(s) -
WOLFF J. G.
Publication year - 1976
Publication title -
british journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.536
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 2044-8295
pISSN - 0007-1269
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8295.1976.tb01524.x
Subject(s) - salience (neuroscience) , weighting , coding (social sciences) , schema (genetic algorithms) , perception , segmentation , psychology , computer science , artificial intelligence , concept learning , pattern recognition (psychology) , cognitive science , natural language processing , cognitive psychology , machine learning , mathematics , statistics , medicine , neuroscience , radiology
The frequency of co‐occurrence of perceptual elements has been employed by Wolff (1975) as an explanatory principle in a model of speech segmentation. Here a computer program is described which uses the same principle to model concept formation. A second program is also described which recognizes or categorizes new patterns using the ‘conceptual structure’ developed by the first program. Six features of human conceptual/recognition systems are modelled with varying degrees of success: Salience of concepts; hierarchical relations amongst concepts; overlap between concepts; ‘fuzziness’ of conceptual boundaries; the polythetic nature of human concepts including the possibility of recognizing patterns in spite of distortions; differential weighting of attributes in recognition. The model incorporates coding by ‘schema plus correction’ proposed by Attneave (1954) and Oldfield (1954) as a means of effecting economical storage of information. However the particular form of this principle used here achieves economical coding only with certain types of data. A possible means of overcoming this problem is briefly considered.