The Modern Definition of Categorical Perception
This evolved into the contemporary definition of CP, which is no longer peculiar to speech or dependent on the motor theory: CP occurs whenever perceived within-category differences are compressed and/or between-category differences are separated, relative to some baseline of comparison. The baseline might be the actual size of the physical differences involved, or, in the case of learned CP, it might be the perceived similarity or discriminability within and between categories before the categories were learned, compared to after.
The typical learned CP experiment would be the following: A set of stimuli is tested (usually in pairs) for similarity or discriminability. In the case of similarity, Multidimensional scaling might be used to scale the rated pairwise similarity of the set of stimuli. In the case of discriminability, same/different judgments and signal detection analysis might be used to estimate the pairwise discriminability of a set of stimuli. Then the same subjects or a different set are trained, using trial and error and corrective feedback, to sort the stimuli into two or more categories. After the categorization has been learned, similarity or discriminability are tested again, and compared against the untrained data. If there is significant within-category compression and/or between-category separation, this is operationally defined as CP.
Read more about this topic: Categorical Perception
Famous quotes containing the words modern, definition, categorical and/or perception:
“Not “Seeing is Believing” you ninny, but “Believing is Seeing.” For modern art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text.”
—Tom Wolfe (b. 1931)
“I’m beginning to think that the proper definition of “Man” is “an animal that writes letters.””
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)
“We do the same thing to parents that we do to children. We insist that they are some kind of categorical abstraction because they produced a child. They were people before that, and they’re still people in all other areas of their lives. But when it comes to the state of parenthood they are abruptly heir to a whole collection of virtues and feelings that are assigned to them with a fine arbitrary disregard for individuality.”
—Leontine Young (20th century)
“The shift from the perception of the child as innocent to the perception of the child as competent has greatly increased the demands on contemporary children for maturity, for participating in competitive sports, for early academic achievement, and for protecting themselves against adults who might do them harm. While children might be able to cope with any one of those demands taken singly, taken together they often exceed children’s adaptive capacity.”
—David Elkind (20th century)