Program
James Hampton (London)
Vagueness in Category Judgments
The Prototype account of concepts suggests that semantic categories are vague because categorization is the result of the application of a variable threshold to an underlying similarity measure. A first study provides some supportive evidence from a task in which people first identified cases where they were uncertain about a categorization, and then chose possible reasons for their selection. Studies will then be reported that support the variable threshold notion by demonstrating contrast and assimilation effects in both unidimensional colour categories and multidimensional semantic categories.
