A model of semantic category representation is being developed to account for a variety of categorization phenomena. In previous work, we demonstrated that categories represented primarily by intrinsic features (i.e., features true of an object in isolation) and those represented primarily by extrinsic features (i.e., relations among entities) differ in structure. This approach has been extended to explain context effects in categorization, inter-subject disagreement among subjects in categorization judgments, and gradedness in the representation of semantic relations. Recently, we have broadened the project to investigate the implications of exemplar-based and abstraction-based models of category representation for people's judgments of the necessity of features in category meaning.
