Natural Kinds vs. Artifacts

Categories help the brain organize people, places, and objects without tracking every detail one by one. People often use visible features to sort new things into familiar groups. A furry, four-legged, tail-wagging, barking animal is likely to be identified as a dog.

This lesson also shows that c...

To organize the world and efficiently use cognitive resources, children learn to place objects, people, and locations into categories.

In a broad sense, a category?like fruits?is a mental representation of a collection of real things that share similar features, such as the presence of seeds.

In this instance, the characteristic of h...