Domain Specificity and Intuitive Ontology

Human-evolved intuitive ontology comprises a catalogue of broad domains of information, different sets of principles applied to these different domains as well as different learning rules to acquire more information about those objects. Some psychologists argue that the specificity of face perception is an illusion and that human beings simply become expert recognizers of faces by using unspecialized visual capacities. The face-recognition system provides a good template for the features one can encounter in other examples of domain-specific systems. Research in the organization of human semantic knowledge should benefit from the combination of evolutionary, neural, and developmental evidence. Research in the field has too often proceeded in the following way: identify an ontological distinction; develop specific hypotheses and gather empirical evidence for domain-specific principles and developmental patterns that differ between ontological categories; and try to integrate neural structures into this picture, often with much more difficulty than was expected.