Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Many theories of object categorization assume that objects are represented in terms of components-attributes such as parts, functions and perceptual properties. The origin of these components has been neglected in concept learning theories. W e provide further evidence for a theory of part ontogeny in which parts are not simply given by perceptual information but develop over the course of category learning. T w o experiments are reported. T h e experiments showed that subjects could identify a component of u n k n o w n stimuli as a part in spite of variation in its shape across exemplars of the category. However, the experiments also revealed perceptual constraints on what variations could be identified as the same part.