NYU Concepts Course

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Lecture schedule ​

The class schedule is

  • Wednesday, Sep 3: Introduction; the classical view
    • Big Book; Chapter 1
  • Wednesday, Sep 10: Prototype and exemplar theories
    • Big Book; Chapter 2 and Chapter 3
    • Rosch, E., & Mervis, C. B. (1975). Family resemblances: Studies in the internal structure of categories. Cognitive Psychology, 7(4), 573-605.
    • Medin, D. L., & Schaffer, M. M. (1978). Context theory of classification learning. Psychological Review, 85, 207-238.
  • Wednesday, Sep 17: Concepts as theories and the knowledge view
    • Big Book; Chapter 4 (pgs. 94-114) and Chapter 6
    • Murphy, G. L., & Medin, D. L. (1985). The role of theories in conceptual coherence. Psychological Review, 92, 289-316.
    • Barsalou, L. W. (1983). Ad hoc categories. Memory & cognition, 11(3), 211-227.
  • Wednesday, Sep 24: Computational models of category learning (part
    • Kruschke, J. L. (1992). ALCOVE: An exemplar-based connectionist model of category learning. Psychological Review, 99, 22-44.
  • Wednesday, Oct 1: Computational models of category learning (part 2)
    • Anderson, J. R. (1991). The adaptive nature of human categorization. Psychological Review, 98(3), 409.
    • Krizhevsky, A., Sutskever, I., & Hinton, G. E. (2012). Imagenet classification with deep convolutional neural networks. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (pp. 1097-1105).
    • (Optional reference on probability theory) Russel, S. J., and Norvig, P. Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. Chapter 13, Uncertainty.
  • Wednesday, Oct 8: Computational models of category learning (part 3)
    • Xu, F., & Tenenbaum, J. B. (2007). Word learning as Bayesian inference. Psychological Review, 114(2), 245.
    • Goodman, N. D., Tenenbaum, J. B., Feldman, J., & Griffiths, T. L. (2008). A rational analysis of rule‐based concept learning. Cognitive Science, 32(1), 108-154.
  • Wednesday, Oct 15: Computational models of category learning (part 4)
    • Heit, E., & Bott, L. (2000). Knowledge selection in category learning. In Psychology of learning and motivation (Vol. 39, pp. 163-199). Academic Press.
    • Rehder, B. (2007). Essentialism as a generative theory of classification. In A. Gopnik, & L. Schultz (Eds.), Causal learning: Psychology, philosophy, and computation (pp. 190-207). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
  • Wednesday, Oct 22: Taxonomic organization and the basic level
    • Big Book; Chapter 7
    • Rosch, E., Mervis, C. B., Gray, W. Johnson, D., & Boyes-Braem, P. (1976). Basic objects in natural categories. Cognitive Psychology, 8, 382-439.
    • Tanaka, J. W., & Taylor, M. (1991). Object categories and expertise: Is the basic level in the eye of the beholder?. Cognitive Psychology, 23(3), 457-482.
  • Wednesday, Oct 29: Category-based induction
    • Big Book; Chapter 8
    • Osherson, D. N., Smith, E. E., Wilkie, O., Lopez, A., & Shafir, E. (1990). Category-based induction. Psychological Review, 97, 185-200.
    • Kemp, C., & Tenenbaum, J. B. (2009). Structured statistical models of inductive reasoning. Psychological Review, 116(1), 20.
  • Wednesday, Nov 5: Concepts in infancy
    • Big Book; Chapter 9
    • Mandler, J. M., & McDonough, L. (1993). Concept formation in infancy. Cognitive Development, 8, 291-318.
    • Quinn, P. C. (2004). Development of subordinate-level categorization in 3- to 7-month-old infants. Child Development, 75, 886-899.
  • Wednesday, Nov 12: Conceptual development
    • Proposal due
    • Big Book; Chapter 10
    • Markman, E. M. (1989). Categorization and naming in children: Problems of induction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (excerpts only)
    • Gelman, S. A. (2003). The essential child. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (excerpts only)
  • Wednesday, Nov 19: How categories influence perception
    • Goldstone, R. L., & Hendrickson, A. T. (2010). Categorical perception. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 1(1), 69-78.
    • Goldstone, R. L. (1994). Influences of categorization on perceptual discrimination. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 123(2), 178.
    • Schyns, P. G., & Rodet, L. (1997). Categorization creates functional features. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 23(3), 681.
  • Wednesday, Nov 26: No class, Legislative Day (classes meet on a Friday schedule)
  • Wednesday, Dec 3: Conceptual combination and exemplar generation
    • Big Book; Chapters 12 and 13
    • Murphy, G. L. (1988). Comprehending complex concepts. Cognitive Science, 12(4), 529-562.
    • Ward, T. B. (1994). Structured imagination: The role of category structure in exemplar generation. Cognitive Psychology, 27(1), 1-40
  • Wednesday, Dec 10: Concepts in the age of AI
    • Piantadosi, S., Muller, D.C.Y., Rule, J.S., Kaushik, K., Gorenstein, M., Leib, E.R., & Sanford, E. (2024). Why concepts are (probably) vectors. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 28(9), 844-856.