616 Concepts and Categorization
Working out the details of this dual nature will go a long way
toward understanding how human thinking can be both con-
crete and symbolic.
A second direction is the development of more sophisti-
cated formal models of concept learning. Progress in neural
networks, mathematical models, statistical models, and ratio-
nal analyses can be gauged by several measures: goodness of
fit to human data, breadth of empirical phenomena accom-
modated, model constraint and parsimony, and autonomy
from human intervention. The current crop of models is fairly
impressive in terms of fitting specific data sets, but there is
much room for improvement in terms of their ability to ac-
commodate rich sets of concepts and to process real-world
stimuli without relying on human judgments or hand coding.
A final important direction will be to apply psychological
research on concepts (see also the chapter by Nickerson &
Pew in this volume). Perhaps the most important and relevant
application is in the area of educational reform. Psychologists
have amassed a large amount of empirical research on vari-
ous factors that impact the ease of learning and transferring
conceptual knowledge. The literature contains excellent sug-
gestions on how to manipulate category labels, presentation
order, learning strategies, stimulus format, and category vari-
ability in order to optimize the efficiency and likelihood of
concept attainment. Putting these suggestions to use in class-
rooms, computer-based tutorials, and multimedia instruc-
tional systems could have a substantial positive impact
on pedagogy. This research can also be used to develop
autonomous computer diagnosis systems, user models, infor-
mation visualization systems, and databases that are orga-
nized in a manner consistent with human conceptual systems.
Given the importance of concepts for intelligent thought, it is
not unreasonable to suppose that concept learning research
will be equally important for improving thought processes.
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