The study of mental representation is a central concern in contemporary cognitive psychology. Knowledge, Concepts, and Categories is unusual in that it presents key conclusions from across the different subfields of cognitive psychology. Readers will find data from many areas, including developmental psychology, formal modeling, neuropsychology, connectionism, and philosophy. The difficulty of penetrating the fundamental operations of the mind is reflected in a number of ongoing debates discussed--for example, do distinct brain systems underlie the acquisition and storage of implicit and explicit knowledge, or can the evidence be accommodated by a single-system account of knowledge representation?

The book can be divided into three distinct parts. Chapters 1 through 5 offer an introduction to the field; each presents a systematic review of a significant aspect of research on concepts and categories. Chapters 6 through 9 are concerned primarily with issues related to the taxonomy of human knowledge. Finally, Chapters 10 through 12 discuss formal models of categorization and function learning.