Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes the basic formal theory from which other theories and models introduced in this treatise are derived. The two theories of this treatise that serve as a basis for other theories introduced are categorical invariance theory (CIT) and generalized invariance structure theory (GIST). The book describes in detail the process of invariance pattern detection proposed in GIST. It presents an overview of the three major theoretical representational paradigms of concept formation: namely, concepts as rules, concepts as prototypes, and concepts as stored exemplars. Much research in cognitive science and psychology has been devoted to the related topics of concept learning, generalization, and categorization. The book discusses the functional theory for representing categorical stimuli defined over semi-continuous dimensions. It explains a new probabilistic model of classification behavior based on representational information theory (RIT) and its generalization.