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1. Verbal labels promote representational alignment even in the absence of communication

   Suffill, E. (January 2020, Proceedings for the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society)

   Denison, S.; Mack, M.; Xu, Y.; Armstrong, B.C. (Ed.)

   What affects whether one person represents an item in a similar way to another person? We examined the role of verbal labels in promoting representational alignment. Three groups of participants sorted novel shapes on perceived similarity. Prior to sorting, participants in two of the groups were pre-exposed to the shapes using a simple visual matching task and in one of these groups, shapes were accompanied by one of two novel category labels. Exposure with labels led people to represent the shapes in a more categorical way and to increased alignment between sorters, despite the two categories being visually distinct and participants in both pre-exposure conditions receiving identical visual experience of the shapes. Results hint that labels play a role in aligning people's mental representations, even in the absence of communication 

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2. The role of shared labels and shared experiences in representational alignment

   Mulkherjee, K; Suresh, S; Yu, X; Lupyan, G (October 2024, The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference (Evolang XV))

   Nölle, J; Raviv, L; Graham, E; Hartmann, S; Jadoul, Y; Josserand, M; Matzinger, T; Mudd, K; Pleyer, M; Slonimska, A (Ed.)

   Successful communication is thought to require members of a speech community to learn common mappings between words and their referents. But if one person’s concept of CAR is very different from another person’s, successful communication might fail despite the common mappings because different people would mean different things by the same word. Here we investigate the possibility that one source of representational alignment is language itself. We report a series of neural network simulations investigating how representational alignment changes as a function of agents having more or less similar visual experiences (overlap in “visual diet”) and how it changes with exposure to category names. We find that agents with more similar visual experiences have greater representational overlap. However, the presence of category labels not only increases representational overlap, but also greatly reduces the importance of having similar visual experiences. The results suggest that ensuring representational alignment may be one of language’s evolved functions. 

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3. Categorizing a Face and Facing a Category: The Constructive Impacts of Ambiguity and Uncertainty in Racial Categorization

   https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672221084537  

   Levy, Aharon; Nguyen, Christine; Slepian, Michael L.; Gaither, Sarah; Pauker, Kristin; Dovidio, John F. (April 2022, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin)

   The past generation has seen a dramatic rise in multiracial populations and a consequent increase in exposure to individuals who challenge monolithic racial categories. We examine and compare two potential outcomes of the multiracial population growth that may impact people’s racial categorization experience: (a) exposure to racially ambiguous faces that visually challenge the existing categories, and (b) a category that conceptually challenges existing categories (including “biracial” as an option in addition to the monolithic “Black” and “White” categories). Across four studies ( N = 1,810), we found that multiple exposures to faces that are racially ambiguous directly lower essentialist views of race. Moreover, we found that when people consider a category that blurs the line between racial categories (i.e., “biracial”), they become less certain in their racial categorization, which is associated with less race essentialism, as well. Importantly, we found that these two effects happen independently from one another and represent two distinct cognitive processes. 

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4. Language and categorization in monolinguals and bilinguals.

   Fairchild, Sarah; Papafragou, Anna (June 2019, Bilingualism)

   People assume that objects labelled alike belong to the same category. Here we asked whether the role of labels in categorization depends on individuals’ language experience, linguistic abilities, and/or cognitive abilities. We compared monolinguals’ and bilinguals’ use of phonologically licit words (zeg), illicit words (gsz), and non-linguistic frames (in addition to a baseline condition with no additional cues) in forming novel categories. For both groups, licit words affected categorization more than frames, especially in the absence of perceptual evidence for category boundaries; illicit words also shifted categorization preferences compared to frames. Furthermore, linguistic abilities predicted reliance on both licit and illicit words, and bilingualism predicted reliance on illicit words in categorization. Thus, in both monolinguals and bilinguals, novel (and even unconventional) linguistic labels act as unique category markers but their use in categorization depends on individual language processing skills (and, in some cases, exposure to a second language). 

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5. Labels, Even Arbitrary Ones, Facilitate Categorization

   Altenhof, A.; Roberts, G. (January 2021, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 43)

   Labels may play a role in the formation and acquisition of ob- ject categories. We investigated this using a free-categorization task, manipulating the presence or absence of labels and whether labels were random or reinforced one of two alterna- tive categorization cues (taxonomic or thematic relationships). When labels were absent, participants used thematic and taxo- nomic cues equally to categorize stimuli. When present, labels were used as the primary cue for category formation, with ran- dom labels leading participants to attend less to taxonomic and thematic relations between stimuli. When labels redundantly reinforced either thematic or taxonomic cues, the use of the cue in question was boosted along with the use of labels as a cue for categorization. Most interestingly, in spite of pre- viously observed associations between labels and taxonomic grouping, labels did not preferentially boost the use of either taxonomic or thematic cues in comparison with the other. 

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