Reasons for Forming Categories and Concepts
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Stimulus Generalization: Humans have a natural tendency to generalize and extend learned behavioral responses to a whole class of stimuli. This allows us to categorize things based on similarities and form concepts to recognize the same experiences again.
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Efficiency: Categorizing things into concepts reduces the amount of information that needs to be retained about a whole group of things. Concepts serve as behavioral equivalence classes, allowing us to store general information more efficiently than individual representations.
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Natural Groupings: The world of objects and things may have regularities, both physical and functional, that naturally lend themselves to categorization. Humans learn about these regularities and form categories based on existing natural boundaries. This idea dates back to ancient Greek philosopher Plato, who suggested that we "cut nature at its joints" whe