Categorical perception is the experience of percept invariances in sensory phenomena that can be varied along a continuum. Multiple views of a face, for example, are mapped onto a common identity, visually distinct objects such as cars are mapped into the same category and distinct speech tokens are identified as belonging to the same phonetic distinct and separate percept. Within a particular part of the continuum, the percepts are perceived as the same, with a sharp change of perception at the position of the continuum where there is identity change. Categorical perception is opposed to continuous perception, the perception of different sensory phenomena as being located on a smooth continuum.
How the neural systems in the brain engages in this many-to-one mapping is a major issue in cognitive neuroscience. Categorical perception (CP) can be inborn or can be induced by learning. Initially it was taken to be peculiar to speech and color perception. However CP turns out to general, and related to how neural networks in our brains detect the features that allow us to sort the things in the world into separate categories by "warping" perceived similarities and differences so that they compress some things into the same category and separate others into different ones.
An area in the left prefrontal cortex has been localized as the place in the brain responsible for phonetic categorical perception and possibly other types of categorical perception.
Read more about Categorical Perception: Categorization, The Motor Theory of Speech Perception, The Modern Definition of Categorical Perception, Computational and Neural Models, Brain Basis, Language-induced Categorical Perception, Emotion and Categorical Perception
Famous quotes containing the words categorical and/or perception:
“We do the same thing to parents that we do to children. We insist that they are some kind of categorical abstraction because they produced a child. They were people before that, and they’re still people in all other areas of their lives. But when it comes to the state of parenthood they are abruptly heir to a whole collection of virtues and feelings that are assigned to them with a fine arbitrary disregard for individuality.”
—Leontine Young (20th century)
“The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and a protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. If that sense is lost, his fellow-men can do little for him.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)