Common Sense Concepts between Compositionality and Typicality Effects: A Dual Process Approach

Typicality effects are a well-established phenomenon in the field of the cognitive research on commonsense concepts. However, typicality effects are hard to reconcile with compositionality, a crucial characteristic of conceptual systems. We propose to face this problem adopting dual process approach, according to which, the existence of two different types of cognitive systems is assumed. The systems of the first type (type 1) are phylogenetically older, unconscious, automatic, associative, parallel and fast. The systems of the second type (type 2) are more recent, conscious, sequential and slow, and are based on explicit rule following. We advance the hypothesis that conceptual representations should consist of (at least) two different kind of components, each responsible for different processes: type 2 processes, involved in complex inference tasks, and fast and automatic type 1 processes, which perform categorization taking advantage from prototypical information associated to concepts.