When some knowledge is missing in the target, meaning it is uncategorized, that knowledge is transferred from memory in the form of anticipations. Because some of the mappings are highly important, they are transformed into a distributed representation of a new concept for further use, which denotes the category learning. The mappings capture commonalities between the target (the representation of the current situation) and the memory, while the anticipations try to fill the missing information in the target, based on the conceptual system. During these alignments various mappings and anticipations emerge. The assumption it steps on is that people constantly make structural alignments between what they experience and what they know.
RoleMap is conceived in such a way that relation-based category learning and categorization emerge while other tasks are performed.
That is why the proposed RoleMap model is based on mechanisms often studied as the analogy-making sub-processes, developed on a suitable for this cognitive architecture. Previous research addresses the hypothesis that the acquisition and the use of relational categories are underlined by structural alignment. A category learning and categorization model aiming to fill this gap is presented. Even though they are commonly used, there are few models taking into account any relational information. For example, predator could not be defined without referring to hunt and prey. Relational categories are structure-based categories, defined not only by their internal properties but also by their extrinsic relations with other categories. These results suggest that people do construct perceptual categories on the basis of overall similarity, at least when similarity is defined in terms of spatial correspondence or alignability rather than individual shared parts or features. Importantly, the experiments demonstrate that this categorization is based on abstract alignment rather than shared parts or features, because when the parts of the individual objects are randomly rearranged, eliminating their shared spatial structure, people no longer perceive them as belonging to a common category.
Five experiments using two new free categorization tasks demonstrate that structural alignment, even without specific matching parts, is sufficient for people to perceive objects as essentially similar and group them into common family-level categories. This article argues for an alternative conception of family resemblance based on structural alignability, i.e., whether objects have corresponding parts-in-relations that can provide the basis for a shared schema or conceptual model. In such experiments, all stimuli generally vary along the same discretely-varying dimensions and family resemblance is defined in terms of the proportion of matching or mismatching values along those dimensions. Much evidence suggests that real-world natural kinds are based on overall similarity or family resemblance, but people often appear surprisingly insensitive to family resemblance in laboratory studies of sorting or free categorization. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved) He proposes a distinction between concepts viewed as a cultural phenomenon and concepts at the psychological level, and suggests a naive model of conceptual development that starts with concepts as similarity clusters and only in restricted cases replaces these with more causal or theory-based conceptual representations. The author discusses the arguments for and against basing categorization on a notion of similarity and concludes that, construed broadly, similarity may yet be the best explanation of how most of our conceptual categories function. However, a number of theorists have recently questioned the degree to which a notion of similarity is sufficiently clearly defined and constrained to serve as an explanation of our categorization. Cars are clearly more similar to other cars than they are to trees, and trees more similar to other trees than they are to cars. In this chapter, the author notes that the intuitive idea that we put things into categories because we find them similar appears to be non-controversial, if not circular.