Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A number of recent studies on early categorization suggest that young infants form category representations for stimuli at both global and basic levels of exclusiveness (i.e., mammal, cat). A set of computational models designed to analyze the factors responsible for the emergence of these representations are presented. The models (1) simulated the formation of global-level and basic-level representations, (2) yielded a global-to-basic order of category emergence and (3) revealed the formation of two distinct global-level representations - an initial "self-organizing' perceptual global level and a subsequently "trained" arbitrary (i.e., non-perceptual) global level. Information from the models is used to make a number of testable predictions concerning category development in infants.