PACKER: An exemplar model of category generation.
Proceedings of the 39th annual meeting of the cognitive science society, X-X. Cognitive Science Society, Austin, TX. 2017
Abstract
Generating new concepts is an intriguing yet understudied topic in cognitive science. In this paper, we present a novel exemplar model of category generation: PACKER (Producing Alike and Contrasting Knowledge using Exemplar Representations). PACKER's core design assumptions are (1) categories are represented as exemplars in a multidimensional psychological space, (2) generated items should be similar to exemplars of the same category, and (3) generated categories should be dissimilar to existing categories. A behavioral study reveals strong effects of contrast and target-class similarity. These effects are novel empirical phenomena, which are directly predicted by the PACKER model but are not explained by existing formal approaches.