ABSTRACT
Mental representations of everyday categories include many features that are neither necessary nor sufficient for membership in the category. Recent proposals have suggested, however, that there may be “core” features in the representation that are critical to category membership. Several researchers have suggested that for artifact categories (chair, pencil, toy, etc.), function serves as the concept core. We conducted two experiments testing whether the function typically associated with an artifact category provides clear boundaries for category membership. We found that some objects that do possess the function typically associated with a category are excluded from category membership, and we also found that some objects that do not possess the standard function are still considered to belong to the category. These results suggest that function may not provide a core for artifact concepts.
