“And what is a Seasnake?” Modelling the acquisition of concept prototypes in a developmental framework

The use of concepts is regarded as fundamental to human-level cognition, but there remain a number of open questions as to the functions of, and structures supporting, this competence. In the context of autonomous cognitive systems, the processes by which such concept functionality could be acquired would be particularly useful - indeed, a developmental account would obviate the need for the provision of explicit information or training supervision by the system designer. This paper seeks to explore this issue by applying a set of principles within a developmental framework that support a wide range of cognitive competencies to this problem, thus seeking to embed the development of concepts into a wider framework of cognitive processing. Comparison with a benchmark conceptual modelling system indicates that the proposed approach can account for a number of features, namely concept-based classification, and its extension to prototype-like functionality.