Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Theories of object recognition and categorization rely on a set of primitives to represent objects. The nature and the development of these primitives have been neglected in computational vision and in concept learning theories. W e present a theory of part ontogeny in which not only perceptual, but also categorical constraints play a role. A two-phase experiment using categories of synthesized 3 D objects (Martian rocks) was conducted to test the theory. The first phase tested the hypothesis that part identification is dependent on categorical context. The second phase tested whether the units extracted in the first phase played a conceptual role in learning a new category. In both phases, subjects interactively delineated the parts of the stimuli while learning the categories. The units subjects identified in the first phase were those that were predictive of the object's category. These units then influenced the perception of parts in the new categories of the second phase.