Categorization and Selective Neurons
Psychology Press eBooks · 2014
There are several aspects to categorization. In the real world events do not repeat exactly. Given the amount of internal noise in our nervous system, even if events did repeat exactly, the internal representations of them might not. Elementary entities in most "cognitive" models are typically assumed to be something called ideas or concepts. Although there are complications, what is required is the notion of an equivalence class that can contain examples that are not identical with other class members but that are somehow "like" them. In any case we are working with a noisy, probabilistic process, trying to form equivalence classes of things which are not really equivalent.