Categorisation and Concepts Flashcards
What is categorisation?
The ability to group different items on the basis of common properties and treat them as equivalent
What is a concept?
The body of information about a category stored in long term memory and used by default in higher cognitive competences
What did Hernstein et al (1990) find?
Pigeons have the ability to acquire concepts (trees specifically)
What did Chase (2001) find?
> Fish
Musical discrimination in learning (Blues or Bach)
Performed well on testing
Transferred to novel situations
What is Feature Theory?
> Animals discriminate by unique features
> Instances are classified on basis of whether or not they contain particular features
What did Cerella (1980) find?
> Trained pigeons to discriminate Charlie Brown
Scrambled features after training
Pigeons continued to respond to scrambled features
Suggests pigeons are insensitive to global object properties
What is Exemplar Theory?
Instances classified either by:
> Remembering category
> Similarity to other, already classified, instances
What did Watanabe (2001) find?
> Facial recognition
Critique of Feature Theory
Found global object properties important in humans
What did Astley and Wasserman (1992) find?
Generalisation of novel stimuli to previous exemplars as a result of training
What did Rescorla-Wagner find?
Reinforced features are amplified in novel stimuli if matching exemplar of previously rewarded category
What is Prototype Theory?
Internal summary representation that corresponds to the average of all the exemplars experienced of a category
What did Wilson et al (1985) find?
> Pigeons
Colour/number matching
Relational cues are overshadowed by individual configurations
40% accuracy (below chance)
What did Katz and Wright (2006) find?
> Pigeons
Relational cues through discrimination
Evidence that pigeons can use relational cues
What are second order relationships?
The ability to discriminate objects on two or more levels simultaneously
What did Dasser (1988) find?
> Java monkeys
Discrimination of other Java monkeys by interpersonal relationship
100% accuracy
