The Psychology of Learning and Motivation: Categories in Use (Volume 47) (Psychology of Learning and Motivation, Volume 47)

Categories support a variety of cognitive activities including inference, problem solving, explanation, and communication.Yet research on categories in cognitive psychology has primarily focused on the learning of categories from unstructured lists of features. This restricted focus has left unexplored the other ways in which categories may be learned and used. Categories in Use considers category learning across a variety of domains including social relationships, money, linguistic structures, engineering innovation, visual object recognition, and referential communication. The goal of the book is to look beyond boundaries of typical studies of categorization to understand how categories are used when people do not necessarily realize that they are using categories.