Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Work on grounding has made a start towards an understanding of where simple perceptual categories come from. But human concepts are made up of more than the simple categories of these models; concepts have internal structure. Within the visual/ spatial domain, it is necessary to go beyond an account of how "square" and "above" are grounded to an account of how "here is a square above a circle which is to the left of a triangle" is grounded. Conceptual/ linguistic structure is not just arbitrary patterning which falls out once the object and relation categories have been identified. Rather, it reflects fundamental aspects of the perception of objects and relations. Thus there is a need to ground the structure as well as the categories which make up concepts.