Extension neglect

Biological Parallel

Vervet monkeys use distinct alarm calls for 'snake,' 'eagle,' 'leopard'—each triggers stereotyped escape responses regardless of threat magnitude or number of predators. A single leopard and a coalition of three trigger identical reactions because the categorical recognition ('leopard-present') collapses distributional information. Humans exhibit parallel extension neglect: investors value companies on sector labels ('tech stock') ignoring number of revenue streams, juries assign sentences based on crime category not victim count, donors contribute to 'endangered species' without asking how many individuals remain. Categorical triggers were computationally cheaper than arithmetic processing in ancestral environments.