DO ARTIFACT CONCEPTS HAVE CORES

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 they may also contain "core" features that are critical to category membership. Several researchers have suggested that for artifacts (chair, pencil, toy, etc.), function serves as the concept core. We conducted four experiments testing whether function is the primary determinat of membership in artifact categories. We found that some objects that do possess the function associated with a category are excluded from category membership, and some objects that do not possess the standard function are still considered to belong to the category. We also found that membership decisions were more influenced by physical features of the objects than by functions. These results suggest that function may not provide a core for artifact concepts, and they cast doubt on the appropriateness of the core hypothesis for at least some common concepts. © 1992.