Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Seriation is the ability to order a set of objects on some dimension such as size. Psychological research on the child's development of seriation has uncovered both cognitive stages and perceptual constraints. A generative connectionist algorithm, cascade- correlation, is used to successfully model these psychological regularities. Previous rule-based models of seriation have been unable to capture either stage progressions or perceptual effects. T h e present simulations provide a number of insights about possible processing mechanisms for seriation, the nature of seriation stage transitions, and the opportunities provided by the environment for learning about seriation.