Feature centrality: Naming versus imagining

Being white is central to whether we call an animal a "polar bear," but it is fairly peripheral to our concept of what a polar bear is. We propose tha t a feature is central to category naming in proportion to the feature's ca tegory validity-the probability of the feature, given the category. In cont rast, a feature is conceptually central in a representation of the object t o the extent that the feature is depended on by other features. Further, we propose that naming and conceptual centrality are more likely to disagree for features that hold at more specific levels (such as is white, which hol ds only for the specific category of polar bear) than for features that hol d at intermediate levels of abstraction (such as has claws, which holds for all bears), In support of these hypotheses, we report evidence that increa sing the abstractness of category features has a greater effect on judgment s of conceptual centrality than on judgments of name centrality and that ot her category features depend more on intermediate-level category features t han on specific ones.