Connecting Object to Symbol in Modeling Cognition

In this toy model of the simplest form of categorization performed by neural nets, CP effects arise as a natural side-effect of the way these particular nets accomplish categorization. Whether the CP effect is universal or peculiar to some kinds of nets (cf. Grossberg 1984), whether the nets' capacity to do simple one-dimensional categorization will scale up to the full multidimensional categorization capacities of human beings, how the grounded labels of these sensory categories are to be combined into strings of symbols that function as propositions about higher-order category membership, and how the nonarbitrary "shape" constraints these symbols inherit from their grounding will affect the functioning of such a hybrid symbol system remain questions for future research. If these results can be generalized, however, the "warping" of analog similarity space may be a significant factor in grounding.