Rumors of Our Death….

Núñez and colleagues (2019) question whether cognitive science still exists "as a coherent academic field with a well-defined and cohesive interdisciplinary research program." This worry may be premature on two grounds. First, we are not convinced that the Lakatosian criterion of coalescence around a core framework is the best standard for judging whether a field is well-defined and productive.

Category learning in the context of co-presented items.

A series of four studies explore how the presentation of multiple items on each trial of a categorization task affects the course of category learning. In a three-category supervised classification task involving multi-dimensionally varying artificial organism-like stimuli, learners are shown a target plus two context items on every trial, with the context items' category membership explicitly identified. These triads vary in whether one, two, or all three categories are represented.

Evidence for an age-independent process in category learning.

After learning to categorize a set of alien-like stimuli in the context of a story, a group of 5-year-old children and adults judged pairs of stimuli from different categories to be less similar than did groups not learning the category distinction. In a same-different task, the learning group made more errors on pairs of non-identical stimuli from the same category than did the other groups, suggesting increased within-category item similarity, or compression. These expansion and compression effects add further support to the view that concept formation involves systematic changes in the metric of similarity space within which objects are represented.