| Description: |
The ability to quickly and accurately categorize is fundamental to human survival. Every day we make hundreds of categorization judgments, and in most cases, are remarkably accurate. In fact, frequently humans are more accurate than the most powerful machines. For example, humans are far better at understanding speech and reading handwriting than any machine yet developed. Why are humans so good at categorization? What sorts of processes and mechanisms underlie human categorization performance? Can we discover these processes and mechanisms in order to build better speech recognition or character recognition machines? The goal of this research is to try to answer some of these questions through experimentation with rather simple perceptual stimuli.The specific focus is on the decision processes involved in multidimensional perceptual categorization, with an emphasis on testing the limits of human categorization performance.
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