Fig. 4.
Categories and the pressure of environment. Inventories of 10 individuals randomly picked up in a population of N = 100 players, with dmin = 0.01, after 107 games. For each player, the configuration of perceptual (small vertical lines) and linguistic (long vertical lines) category boundaries is superimposed to a colored histogram indicating the relative frequency of stimuli. The labels indicate the unique word associated to all perceptual categories forming each linguistic category. Three cases are presented: one with uniformly distributed stimuli (Left) and two with stimuli randomly extracted from the hue distribution of natural pictures [Center (courtesy of Hamad Darwish) and Right]. One can appreciate the perfect agreement of category names and the good alignment of linguistic category boundaries. Moreover, linguistic categories tend to be more refined in regions where stimuli are more frequent: an example of how the environment may influence the categorization process.