Professor James A Hampton

Professor James A Hampton

Professor of Psychology

Department of Psychology

Overview

After studying Natural Sciences at Cambridge, Professor Hampton took his Phd in Psychology at University College London before moving to City in 1977. Since then he has had Visiting Appointments in the USA at Stanford, Cornell, Chicago, Yale and New York Universities.

His research interests have broadly concerned the interface between psychology, philosophy and linguistics as applied to the problem of concepts and word meaning.

Professor Hampton has championed a view of concepts known as the Prototype Model, according to which people represent concepts by concentrating on clear central examples rather than on the boundary cases between one concept and another.

He has also published a series of studies of Conceptual Combination, in which he showed that the way in which simple logical connectives such as "and", "or" and "not" operate in natural language is only approximately related to their operation in set logic. An explanation is provided by the proposal that when we form a complex concept such as "Bird that is also a Pet", a process is invoked that seeks to integrate the prototype information representing each concept into a single composite.

Research interests 

Professor Hampton's research concerns the psychology of concepts and categorization, including the way in which people understand the world by classifying objects, people, events or situations into different conceptual types or categories, and problems arising from the vagueness of word meanings.

Selected recent publications

Gibbert, M., Hampton, J.A., Estes, Z., & Mazursky, D. (2011). The Curious Case of the Refrigerator-TV: Similarity and Hybridization. Cognitive Science, (in press).

Hampton, J.A. (2011). Concepts and Natural Language. In R. Belohlavek and G. J. Klir (Eds.) Concepts and Fuzzy Logic. (pp. 233-258). Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Hampton, J.A. (2011). Conceptual Combinations and Fuzzy Logic. In R. Belohlavek and G. J. Klir (Eds.) Concepts and Fuzzy Logic. (pp.209-231). Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Hampton, J.A., & Jönsson, M.L. (2011). Typicality and Compositionality: The Logic of Combining Vague Concepts. In M.Werning, W.Hinzen & E.Machery (Eds.) Oxford Handbook of Compositionality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (in press).

Hampton, J.A., Aina, B., Andersson, J.M., Mirza, H., & Parmar, S. (2011). The Rumsfeld Effect: the Unknown Unknown. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory & Cognition, (in press).

Hampton, J.A., Passanisi, A., & Jönsson, M.L. (2011). The Modifier Effect and Property Mutability. Journal of Memory and Language, 64, 233-248.

Heussen, D., Voorspoels, W., Verheyen, S., Storms, G., & Hampton, J.A. (2011). Raising argument strength using negative evidence: A constraint on models of induction. Memory & Cognition, (in press).

Jönsson, M.L., & Hampton, J.A. (2011). The modifier effect in within-category induction: Default inheritance in complex noun phrases. Language and Cognitive Processes, 26, (in press).

Thompson, E.H., & Hampton, J.A. (2011). The Effect of Relationship Status on Communicating Emotions through Touch. Cognition and Emotion, 25, 295-306.

Teaching