Publisher's Synopsis
The study of mental representation is seen as a central concern in contemporary cognitive psychology. This work presents conclusions from across the different subfields of cognitive psychology. Readers will find data from developmental psychology, formal modelling, neuropsychology, connectionism, and philosophy. The difficulty of penetrating the fundamental operations of the mind is reflected in a number of ongoing debates discussed - for example, do distinct brain systems underlie the acquisition and storage of implicit and explicit knowledge, or can the evidence be accommodated by a single-system account of knowledge representation?;The book can be divided into three parts. Chapters one to five offer an introduction to the field; each presents a systematic review of a significant aspect of research on concepts and categories. Chapters six to nine are concerned primarily with issues related to the taxonomy of human knowledge. Finally, chapters ten to twelve discuss formal models of categorization and function learning.
