Categorization Flashcards
What is concept formation?
Identify between things based on their shared properties
Do animals form concepts? Give an example
Pigeons were shown four different response keys to get food. Pigeons could identify other pictures of cars and peck on them if the car picture gave them food. They seemed to have understood the concept of a car (Bhatt et al., 1988).
What is a basic level concept?
Based on perceptual similarity, eg: bird or flower.
How many theories are there of basic-level concept formation?
Two: Exemplar theory and prototype theory.
What is exemplar theory?
Animals learn about the exemplars they’re trained with. They store these stimuli in their heads and then compare any test stimuli with it. However, this might take up a lot of memory. Performance with items you’ve never seen before will be consistently worse than with items you have seen before.
What is prototype theory?
Prototype theory states that an animal creates a “prototype” of a category in its head using the distinctive features of the objects is has seen before. The object is abstracted, so it does not necessarily represent anything that has already been seen. Novel items thus may be responded to better than familiar ones because they may be more similar to the abstract prototypes created.
What is feature theory?
It is a variation of the exemplar theory, but it can predict the prototype effect. Instead of treating the stimuli as a whole, it is broken down into its constituent components. It assumes that each stimulus comprises components that are associated with category membership.
How can we determine if all categories are a kind of associative learning?
This can be tested through blocking. If a particular feature is associated with a category on its own, it can be expected that it would predict the category more easily than if it’s paired with something else (because that would make it less surprising and reduce associative learning).
Shanks 1990
Participants were made to learn what symptoms predicted what disease. They were then tested on their symptom-disease associations.
If there are two diseases, one that’s very common and one that’s novel. Runny nose-flu are a common, unsurprising pairing, so headache-flu won’t form a strong association. But because neuroscience allergy is a more surprising stimulus, rash-NA won’t be as strong an association, so NA-headache can become stronger.
What is a nonassociative account?
It predicts that the surprisingness of a stimulus does not impact the likelihood of associations being formed.
Associative theory
Predicts that surprise is an important factor in forming associations.
What are superordinate categories?
A high-level category that subsumes a number of basic-level categories. For example, “animal” is a superordinate category including the basic-level categories cat, fish, elephant, and so on. Category members are not physically similar.
What does Pearce (1997) think about superordinate categories?
It is not true categorisation when animals do it, simply associative learning. When humans do it, it is somehow more complicated.
Wasserman et al (1995)
Animals were given a set of icons. If a set where everything was the same was presented, the birds had to peck one key. If they had a set of different icons, they had to peck a different key. And then they tested them with novel stimuli. Slightly above 50% (chance), so they concluded that animals can form superordinate concepts
