Katie Warburton

I am a cognitive science Ph.D. student with the Complex Human Data Hub at the University of Melbourne and the Computational Linguistics Group at the University of Toronto. My research focuses on category systems.


I am particularly interested in studying how the structure of a category system can encode the needs and biases of its creators, and how these systems evolve in response to a potentially changing set of items encountered over time. To do this, I explore synthetic category systems created in controlled laboratory experiments and more formalized real-world category systems such as the Dewey Decimal System.


I am supervised by Charles Kemp, Yang Xu, and Lea Frermann.

Papers

Warburton, K., Kemp, C., Xu, Y. & Frermann, L. (2024). Quantifiying bias in hierarchical category systems. Open Mind: Discoveries in Cognitive Science, 8, 102-130. A shorter version appeared in CogSci 45.