Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The features of a concept differ in their centrality. Having a seat is more central to the concept of chair than is having arms. This paper claims that centrality is not a homogeneous phenomenon in that it has at least two aspects, conceptual and naming. We propose that a feature is central to naming in proportion to the feature's category validity, the probability of the feature given the category. In contrast, a feature is conceptually central (immutable) to the extent the feature is depended on by other features. We predict that conceptual and naming centrality diverge as categories become more specific. An experiment is reported that provides corroborating evidence. Increasing the specificity of object categories increased the judged mutability of representative features without affecting their judged appropriateness for determining names.