The 32nd Carnegie Symposium on Cognition
June 7-9, 2002 .."Building Object Categories in Developmental Time"
 

June 7 - 9, 2002
Lisa Gershkoff-Stowe and David Rakison, Organizers

Overview

This symposium will bring together researchers with diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and methods to address key questions about the nature of category representations and the mechanisms that produce them. Investigators will address the question of how children build object categories from the ground up, beginning with the basic architecture of the brain and with the constraints or biases that provide the foundation of early perceptual experience. These developments will be considered in view of subsequent growth of categorical and semantic abilities.

Research will be presented that examines three interrelated themes: (1) fundamental processes by which infants are able to individuate and categorize objects and their physical properties, (2) the contribution of language in the selection of features relevant for object categorization, and (3) high-level cognitive processes that guide the formation of coherent systems of category knowledge.

The aim is to encourage the exchange of ideas, to synthesize the field’s progress, and to call attention to areas where additional empirical studies are needed. The results of the symposium will be published as the 32nd in the series of Carnegie Cognition Symposium volumes.

The Carnegie Symposium on Cognition is sponsored by -
The Department of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University

The Carnegie Symposium on Cognition is supported by -
The National Science Foundation  NSF
The National Institutes of Health  NIH