The ability to group objects together that are perceptually dissimilar (e.g., different cats), and treat them as members of a single category. The ability to form categories has been shown to exist even in 3-month-old infants. However, the category structures of infants differ from those of adults. It is a crucial type of learning as it underlies all forms of cognitive activities, and occurs simultaneously along different dimensions and at different levels of abstraction [e.g., ‘brown dog’ can evoke the dimensions of the color category, the part category (e.g., tail) and the object category (e.g., animal) at various levels of abstraction (e.g., ‘dark brown’, ‘short tail’)]. Such learning has been a focus of adaptive computational models of categorization.
See Cognitive development; Computational models, Learning, Representation (mental)