An assumption in Cognitive Psychology, which has been challenged in recent years, is that the systems responsible for action and perception work independently of one another. These systems work together during conceptual tasks and research has demonstrated that action knowledge can influence performance even when the task is 'action-irrelevant' (Borghi, 2004; Borghi, Flumini, Natraj & Wheaton, 2012; Creem & Proffitt, 2001; Tucker & Ellis, 1998, 2001). However, participants in such tasks are often only asked to make simple category judgements, such as natural versus man made. The research reported in this thesis has shown that, under certain conditions, participants use action knowledge to make 'complex' category choices in an action-irrelevant task. The experimental work has predominantly used the forced-choice triad task to assess the circumstances under which participants categorise objects based on shared actions. The triads were designed with a target object and two choice objects matching on either shared actions (rifle + water pistol), shared taxonomic relations (rifle + sword), or both (orange + banana). The context in which the objects were presented was also manipulated so that the objects were either presented on a white background (context-lean) or being used by an agent (context-rich). Participants were most likely to select the choice object that shared both a taxonomic and an action demonstrating that action has an 'additive' effect in categorical decisions. Presenting the objects being used by an agent in a functional scenario increased the saliency of the shared actions between the stimuli, and participants were more likely to select the action choice. The subsequent experimental work reported in the thesis sought to eliminate potential confounding variables including perceptual features, object typicality and task instructions. What the experimental work presented here has demonstrated is that action can influence decisions on more complex categories, and judgments of similarity. The research has identified three main circumstances under which knowledge of action becomes influential in the triad task designed for the purpose of this research as follows: (i) when it is presented in conjunction with taxonomic information, (ii) when it is presented with a context, and (iii) when participants are first asked to physically interact with the objects.

Although concepts are located within individual minds, while word forms are shared across entire language communities, words and concepts are normally deemed to be tightly bound. But in fact, at least to the extent that concepts vary, the relationship between words and concepts may not be as uniform or stable as is often assumed. Nevertheless, language may itself mediate that relationship, through its entrenchment and use. Psychologists have already investigated language use in referential communication, but they have yet to focus in detail on the role of language in conceptual coordination. One of the obstacles has been the theoretical and methodological challenges that arise from seriously abandoning conceptual universals. To that end, an experimental framework was developed based on sorting tasks in which participants freely partition a set of stimuli into categories and an objective measure for comparing two outputs. Four experiments were then conducted to investigate whether people were conceptually coordinated before, during and after linguistic interaction. Experiment 1 consisted of a cross-linguistic study looking at default coordination between native speakers. Participants both sorted items into groups and named them individually. There was a relatively high degree of categorisation agreement among speakers of the same language, but not nearly as high as for naming agreement. Experiments 2-4 inquired into conceptual coordination during or immediately after linguistic interaction. Experimental manipulations involved the form of language use (full dialogue or only category labels), as well as the type of feedback (category groupings, labels, both, or neither). In particular, Experiment 2 investigated the effects of categorising a set of objects together, with or without dialogue, on subsequent individual categorisation. The results were inconclusive and revealed specific methodological issues, but yielded interesting data and were encouraging for the general framework. Experiment 3 modified the designwhile testing and extending the same general hypotheses. Participants carried out a sequence of categorisation tasks in which they tried to coordinate their categories, followed by individual categorisation and similarity tasks. The availability of dialogue and feedback was manipulated in the interactive tasks. During interaction, they also received both kinds of feedback, except in the control condition. Pairs that could talk coordinated much better than the others, but feedback didn’t help. Experiment 4 looked into the effects of the four possibilities for feedback during a longer sequence of interactive tasks. In general, conceptual coordination was found to depend on grouping feedback only. However, by the end of the task, pairs who received both kinds of feedback did best. All three interactive experiments also measured lexical convergence between pairs. The results generally revealed a dissociation, with lexical alignment showingmore convergence and occurring under a wider variety of conditions. Togetherwith previous research, these findings showthat language can bring about conceptual coordination. However, it appears that the richer the form of language use, the more conceptual convergence occurs, and the closer it gets coupled with lexical convergence. The long-term effects, if any, are much weaker. These studies have implications for the general role of language in cognition and other important issues.

<p>Syftet med denna C-uppsats har varit att få en ökad förståelse i hur vårdgivare arbetar med människor i ett mellanrum mellan två kategorier samt att belysa den problematik som finns med att kategorisera människor som dubbeldiagnos. Dubbeldiagnos är en kategorisering som ibland skapar problem som gör att dessa klienter hamnar i ett mellanrum mellan kommunen och landstinget. Denna studie är baserad på en kvalitativ metod med grundad teori som forskningsdesign. Intervjuer har gjorts med respondenter från psykiatrin, boendeverksamhet, öppenvårdsverksamhet och socialtjänsten. Resultatet tyder bland annat på att det som är viktigast i arbetet med dubbeldiagnoser är samverkan mellan vårdgivarna. Diagnosen kan även medföra att klienterna känner sig stämplade. Den viktiga eftervården brister i kvalité som bottnar i de bristande resurser som finns. Detta resultat diskuteras i diskussionen med hjälp av teorier om social kategorisering och typifiering.</p>

Syftet med denna C-uppsats har varit att få en ökad förståelse i hur vårdgivare arbetar med människor i ett mellanrum mellan två kategorier samt att belysa den problematik som finns med att kategorisera människor som dubbeldiagnos. Dubbeldiagnos är en kategorisering som ibland skapar problem som gör att dessa klienter hamnar i ett mellanrum mellan kommunen och landstinget. Denna studie är baserad på en kvalitativ metod med grundad teori som forskningsdesign. Intervjuer har gjorts med respondenter från psykiatrin, boendeverksamhet, öppenvårdsverksamhet och socialtjänsten. Resultatet tyder bland annat på att det som är viktigast i arbetet med dubbeldiagnoser är samverkan mellan vårdgivarna. Diagnosen kan även medföra att klienterna känner sig stämplade. Den viktiga eftervården brister i kvalité som bottnar i de bristande resurser som finns. Detta resultat diskuteras i diskussionen med hjälp av teorier om social kategorisering och typifiering.

The ability to reason about categories and category membership is fundamental to human cognition, and as a result a considerable amount of research has explored the acquisition and modelling of categorical structure from a variety of perspectives. These range from feature norming studies involving adult participants (McRae et al. 2005) to long-term infant behavioural studies (Bornstein and Mash 2010) to modelling experiments involving artificial stimuli (Quinn 1987). In this thesis we focus on the task of natural language categorisation, modelling the cognitively plausible acquisition of semantic categories for nouns based on purely linguistic input. Focusing on natural language categories and linguistic input allows us to make use of the tools of distributional semantics to create high-quality representations of meaning in a fully unsupervised fashion, a property not commonly seen in traditional studies of categorisation. We explore how natural language categories can be represented using distributional models of semantics; we construct concept representations for corpora and evaluate their performance against psychological representations based on human-produced features, and show that distributional models can provide a high-quality substitute for equivalent feature representations. Having shown that corpus-based concept representations can be used to model category structure, we turn our focus to the task of modelling category acquisition and exploring how category structure evolves over time. We identify two key properties necessary for cognitive plausibility in a model of category acquisition, incrementality and non-parametricity, and construct a pair of models designed around these constraints. Both models are based on a graphical representation of semantics in which a category represents a densely connected subgraph. The first model identifies such subgraphs and uses these to extract a flat organisation of concepts into categories; the second uses a generative approach to identify implicit hierarchical structure and extract an hierarchical category organisation. We compare both models against existing methods of identifying category structure in corpora, and find that they outperform their counterparts on a variety of tasks. Furthermore, the incremental nature of our models allows us to predict the structure of categories during formation and thus to more accurately model category acquisition, a task to which batch-trained exemplar and prototype models are poorly suited.

Yes / Young children often struggle with referential communications because they fail to compare all valid referents. In two studies, we investigated this comparison process. In Study 1, 4- to 7-year-olds (N=114) were asked to categorize pairs of objects according to their similarities or differences, and then identified a unique quality of one of the objects by responding to a referential question. Children found it easier to judge the differences between objects than similarities. Correct judgments of differences predicted accurate identifications. In Study 2, 4- to 5-year-olds (N=36) again categorized according to similarities or differences, but this time were asked for verbal explanations of their decisions. Recognition of differences was easier than recognition of similarities. Explanations of errors were either: a) ambiguous; b) color error: c) thematic (creative imaginative explanations). Children offered thematic explanations when they failed to recognize similarities between objects, but not for errors of difference.

This thesis investigates the strategies infants use to generalise labels to different objects in the early stages of lexical development. It aims to directly test the assumption that a taxonomic bias exists which guides infants to extend words to categories of objects instead of individual instances of them, against the hypothesis that infants discover the extension of words through exposure to multiple naming instances of different objects.Experiments One and Two attempted to teach two object-label pairings to infants at the end of their first year of life, and test generalisation of those labels to new objects from the same adult linguistic categories. This aim failed because infants showed evidence for prior knowledge of the words. Experiments Three and Four employed a more infant-controlled procedure using a habituation task during training; in the former a single exemplar from each adult category was used, whereas in the latter multiple exemplars from each category were used. In both Experiments evidence for word learning was provided at test, but infants failed to generalise the labels to other objects. Experiment Five used a training phase identical to Experiment Four but tested infants for perceptual categorisation in the absence of any labels. Some infants showed evidence for their ability to create such categories on the basis of the training set, suggesting that the inability to generalise in Experiments Three and Four was not due to a perceptual limitation. These findings suggest that infants at the end of their first year do not seem to be guided by any linguistic biases in their generalisation of labels. This thesis concludes that 10-month-old infants seem to have more advanced linguistic abilities than has previously been thought and constraint-like behaviour in later stages of lexical development might be a result of experience instead of a qualitative shift in cognitive processes.

This thesis develops and explores a constitutive approach to colour vision, which serves as an alternative to the standard experiential view of colour vision operating in the philosophy of colour. The approach seeks to describe the nature or essence of colour vision qua psychological kind. I argue that it is constitutive of colour vision that an organism possesses the ability to achieve colour constancy. An important feature of my account is that colour constancy is characterised as the ability to discriminate differences in surface reflectance properties across changes in illumination conditions. This differs from the standard ‘appearance invariance view’, which characterises colour constancy by appealing to the phenomenology of apparent colour. I consider an important objection to the appearance invariance view posed by the argument from illumination, which might also seem to carry over to the reflectance discrimination view. The objection is based on the claim that in standard cases of colour constancy the phenomenology of apparent colour is partly illumination-dependent. I argue that the reflectance discrimination view is perfectly able to accommodate this point. As a case study in applying the constitutive approach to illuminate the distinctive nature of colour vision, I argue that a vivid feature of our ordinary experience of colour known as categorical perception should be dissociated from our colour vision abilities. Although colour ontology often is not at the forefront of discussion, these constitutive theses support the ontological view of colour known as reflectance physicalism. I critique the argument from colour similarity, which many take to pose the greatest threat to reflectance physicalism. The thrust of the argument is that colours phenomenally appear to stand in similarity relations that do not correlate with the similarities that are evident among reflectance properties. This argument lacks much force, however, as it fails to acknowledge the extreme context sensitivity of similarity and the presentation sensitivity of our knowledge of similarities.

Categorisation is the process by which items, behaviours and events are compartmentalised according to their defining attributes or properties. This may be based on simple perceptual similarities or on more complex conceptual webs. Whatever their selection criteria, categories expedite inferential capabilities, facilitating behavioural predictions and subsequently enabling response. Categorisation waives conscious effort whilst preserving that which is salient and as such, provides a highly efficient means of delineating and organising information within semantic memory. An ability to categorise is therefore fundamental to an individual’s capacity to understand the world and a necessary precursor to academic achievement. This thesis comprises a series of studies that were devised in order to investigate categorisational development in children. Study 1 involved the development of a theoretically and practically valid testing mechanism. A sample of 159 children, aged 30-50 months, participated in a series of investigations aimed at establishing the impact of test format and presentation dimensionality on categorisation performance. As a result of this, a new test battery was devised which enabled more fine grain differentiation than had been possible with the tests used by previous researchers. The battery measured four different aspects of preschool children’s categorisational abilities -categorising according to shape; according to colour; when presented with drawings of items, and when presented with the same items in the form of toys. Results found that children’s ability to categorise differed significantly according to their sex, socio-economic background and the dimensionality of the item. Study 2 utilised the same battery with 190 participants from demographically diverse cohorts. Significant differences were found between high and low socio-economic groups and between boys and girls. A Mixed- Factorial ANOVA, with a post-hoc Bonferroni demonstrated a main effect of sex; a main effect of cohort and an interaction between sex and cohort. A Kruskal-Wallis Test also showed age to be significant, confirming the findings of previous researchers concerning a developmental trajectory. However, it also found that relatively sophisticated conceptual webs emerge earlier than had previously been thought. Whilst the results from Study 2 had demonstrated relative homogeneity amongst socio-economic groups, it was noted that participants from the most disadvantaged neighbourhood performed better than those from the other low socio-economic cohort. As the two Nurseries employed different approaches, with one offering a formal curriculum and the other emphasising child-led play, it was decided that the final study would focus on categorical development in these two cohorts. The final study therefore investigated conceptual development during 96 participants’ first twelve weeks of nursery education. Forty-eight participants were drawn from a Community Nursery with a strong emphasis on child-led play and 48 were drawn from a Nursery attached to a Primary School, where the emphasis was on more formalised learning. Children’s categorisational abilities were measured during their first week in Nursery using the test battery devised for Study 1. They were then re-tested using a matched battery twelve weeks later. Change scores were calculated and analysed using a series of one-way ANOVAs. As anticipated, all participants made gains but the children who had participated in play made significantly greater gains in three out of the four measures. It is thus asserted that play is a key conducer in cognitive development and a causal executant in establishing rudimentary automaticity and, as such, should be the polestar of preschool education. This is particularly important for boys from low socio-economic backgrounds who face contiguous disadvantage. Therefore, this research demonstrates that memory-based research with young children should be conducted with toys and objects, rather than images, and that the link between social and educational stratification has its roots in early childhood and is best addressed through the provision of high-quality play opportunities.

One aspect of the internet that has been discussed in relation to identity creation is whether we can transcend our physical selves when we enter an online environment, thus potentially creating the internet as a space where we could leave our bodies when performing our identity. The purpose of this master thesis is to investigate the accomplishment of membership categorization within the domain of online gaming and through it identity in an online gaming environment. This thesis argues that the discourse within Dota2 constructs the identity of the unsuccessful gamer as an outsider or deviant in terms of nationality, sexuality, and mental capability. Games of Dota2 have been observed and the interaction via the in game chat system has been transcribed and analyzed using Membership Categorization Analysis. The study found that membership was not commonly assigned but when it was, it was associated with the incumbent being on one’s own team and performing lower than expected. Also, in the cases where categories were assigned to players, these were assigned to unsuccessful players (This interactive feature is supported previous research by Eklund (2011) and Linderoth &amp; Olsson (2010) in that they created the game as male centric western European space. The expectations of a successful player were not accomplished in order to inform the identity creation process of successful gamers. The results suggest that identity in Dota2 is structured around a players displayed skill and that the identity created is often based on stereotypes associated with certain nationalities, genders and mental capabilities. The use of MCA offered a holistic approach to how identities were created in online gaming that allowed the researcher to approach the subject without any preconceptions as to what would be found. The study also showed that the use of MCA may be useful when it comes to identity creation within virtual worlds.