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{
    "pk": 33060,
    "title": "The \"Rational\" Number e:  A Functional Analysis of Categorization",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "Category formation is constrained by three factors: the \nperceptual structure of the domain being categorized, the \nlimitations and biases of the learner, and the goals that \ntrigger the learning process in the first place. Many \nstudies of categorization have paid attention to the effects \nof the structure of the world and some to the biases due to \nthe learner's prior knowledge. This paper explores the \nthird factor: how the goals of the agent at the time of the \nlearning episode affect what categories are formed. In \nparticular it presents an information theoretical account \nthat views categories as a means to increase the agent's \nchances of achieving its goals. One of the predictions of \nthe theory is that information gain, the average reduction \nof uncertainty induced by a category, is maximized when \nthe domain is partitioned into about 3 categories, the \nclosest integer to the irrational number e. This prediction \nis confirmed by evidence derived from anthropological \nstudies of folk classifications of animal and plants by \ndifferent societies from around the world, and also by an \ninformal observation of the behavior of cognitive \nscientists. Interestingly, e also emerges from \noptimization analyses of memory search as well as from \nexperimental work on memory retrieval.",
    "language": "eng",
    "license": {
        "name": "",
        "short_name": "",
        "text": null,
        "url": ""
    },
    "keywords": [],
    "section": "17",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5750w6jf",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Angel",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Cabrera",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Georgia Institute of Technology",
            "department": ""
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": null,
    "date_accepted": null,
    "date_published": "1995-01-01T18:00:00Z",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "PDF",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/33060/galley/24121/download/"
        }
    ]
}