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Wiley, Cognitive Science: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 6(35), p. 1162-1189, 2011

DOI: 10.1111/j.1551-6709.2011.01178.x

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Acquiring Contextualized Concepts: A Connectionist Approach

Journal article published in 2011 by Saskia van Dantzig, Antonino Raffone, Bernhard Hommel ORCID
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Abstract

Conceptual knowledge is acquired through recurrent experiences, by extracting statistical regularities at different levels of granularity. At a fine level, patterns of feature co-occurrence are categorized into objects. At a coarser level, patterns of concept co-occurrence are categorized into contexts. We present and test CONCAT, a connectionist model that simultaneously learns to categorize objects and contexts. The model contains two hierarchically organized CALM modules (Murre, Phaf, & Wolters, 1992). The first module, the Object Module, forms object representations based on co-occurrences between features. These representations are used as input for the second module, the Context Module, which categorizes contexts based on object co-occurrences. Feedback connections from the Context Module to the Object Module send activation from the active context to those objects that frequently occur within this context. We demonstrate that context feedback contributes to the successful categorization of objects, especially when bottom-up feature information is degraded or ambiguous.