8. Concepts Flashcards
The Bruner cards.
Selection task.
Reception task.
Cards for testing how we learn concepts.
Each card had four attributes:
Number, shape, colour, border.
The selection task has participants choose the cards - researcher says yes or no.
The reception task has researcher choosing the cards.
Conservative focusing
A concept formation strategy under Bruner’s selection task. Participants select one of the four attributes they think is the “rule”. If they find a contradiction between what they thought and what they’re told, they move on to the next attribute.
Focus gambling
Also under Bruner’s selection task.
A participant using this strategy would select cards that change in two ore more attributes. They’re mainly hoping that the researcher says “positive”, because this means they’ve rendered multiple attributes irrelevant.
If the researcher says negative, now you have to figure out who the culprit is.
Simultaneous scanning
Selection task.
You pay attention to all four attributes of each card at once, and as you see each card, you note every way the card is different, plus whether or not it’s a positive instance.
If the original card is a positive instance and the next card you select is a positive instance, then you can eliminate the attributes that you noticed changed.
Wholist strategy vs partist
Reception task.
Wholist: Participant initially assumes all attributes are pertinent.
Partist: Participant initally assumes only one attribute is pertinent.
Railroad diagrams
An example of finite-state grammar. A way of creating strings of letters, so that you could test participants’ ability to learn the underlying railroad diagram.
Implicit vs explicit learning
Learning unintentionally vs learning intentionally.
You’ve experienced both in Hamilton. Sometimes you listen to a song so much you pick it up, other times you’re on genius.com, running it stanza by stanza.
Language might be better learned implicitly!
More notes on implicit learning.
Jean uses implicit learning!
A lot of students try to implicit learn by doing tons of problems.
Language, socializing, conversations are often learned implicitly.
This raises a couple interesting points for intelligence, no?
More notes on explicit learning
This is what IQ tests test! There’s also some evidence suggesting explicit, or “academic” intelligence is an evolutionarily new concept to humans.
Reber
A researcher who had something to do with implicit vs explicit learning. Somehow he knew that implicit is evolutionarily new and explicit is evolutionarily old.
Wittgenstein’s Analysis of Concepts
He asked the question - “what is the concept of a game?” and rattled off a long list of examples. Similarities popped up, and dropped away.
He says concepts are more like family resemblance. There’s no one thing tying them all together, but they’re still related.
THIS MAKES SENSE. THE CONCEPT OF FAMILY IS FAMILIAR.
Rosch’s Perceived World Structure
The fact that attributes often appear in groups.
Like birds - usually have feathers, wings, fly.
Rosch’s Cognitive Economy
The balance between the need to categorize and the ned to simplify.
Superordinate, basic, subordinate
Levels of inclusivity in Rosch’s two principles of concepts.
Here, they’re listed from most inclusive to least inclusive.
The Vertical Dimension
Superordinate, basic, subordinate.
Children learn the basic first, superordinate and subordinate come later.
The more experience you have something, the more subtle your distinctions -> “basic-level” concept of a piano might be different for a musician compared to a non-musician.
Like Alice and James and their Fazioli pianos!
