FREQUENCY, CONCEPTUAL STRUCTURE AND PATTERN RECOGNITION
James Gerard Wolff · British Journal of Psychology · 1976
The frequency of co‐occurrence of perceptual elements has been employed by Wolff (1975) as an explanatory principle in a model of speech segmentation. Here a computer program is described which uses the same principle to model concept formation. A second program is also described which recognizes or categorizes new patterns using the ‘conceptual structure’ developed by the first program. Six features of human conceptual/recognition systems are modelled with varying degrees of success: Salience of concepts; hierarchical relations amongst concepts; overlap between concepts; ‘fuzziness’ of conceptual boundaries; the polythetic nature of human concepts including the possibility of recognizing patterns in spite of distortions; differential weighting of attributes in recognition. The model incorporates coding by ‘schema plus correction’ proposed by Attneave (1954) and Oldfield (1954) as a means of effecting economical storage of information. However the particular form of this principle used here achieves economical coding only with certain types of data. A possible means of overcoming this problem is briefly considered.