Intersubject Agreement in Functional and Perceptual Categories

Abstract

Even though the difference between functional and perceptual categorization is widely accepted, most current theories don't seem to extend this distinction to process and representation issues. Some differences that have been investigated (both from theoretical and empirical points of view) are reviewed, and the idea is put forward that there are process and representation differences that allow us to predict a lower level of intersubject agreement for functional as compares to perceptual categorizations. A procedure was designed that allowed to reliably distinguish between each type of categorization. As expected, there were significant differences in intersubject agreement level. Some alternative explanations for our results are discussed