Categories and Instances in Human Cognition and AI
Turning regularities into categories is an important aspect of human cognition. We can make generalizations about new events and entities based on the categories we think they belong to. Structuring knowledge into categories also facilitate search and retrieval. Moreover, remembering specific instances of categories (e.g., the first day at a job) is crucial for how we process information. Similarly, artificial intelligence systems require the capacity to represent and reason about both categories and instances.