Ch 9 Conceptual knowledge Flashcards
Concepts
A mental representation of a class or individual. Also, the meaning of objects, events, and abstract ideas. An example of a concept would be the way a person mentally represents “cat” or “house”
Category
Groups of objects that belong together because they belong to the same class of objects, such as “houses”, “furniture”, or “school”
Categorization
The process by which objects are placed in categories.
Definitional approach to categorization.
The idea that we can decide wether something is a member of category by determining wether the object meets the definition of the category. Family resemblances
Family resemblance
In considering the process of categorization, the idea that things in a particular category resemble each other in a number of ways. This approach can be contrasted with the definition approach, which states that an object belongs to a category only when it meets a definite set of criteria.
Prototype approach to categorization.
The idea that we decide wether something is a member of a category by determining wether it is similar to a standard representation of a category, called a prototype.
Prototype
A standard used in categorization that is formed by averaging the category members a person has encountered in the past.
Typicality
Highly typical means that a category member closely resembles the category prototype.
Sentence verification technique
A technique in which the participants is asked to indicate wether a particular sentence is true or false. For example, sentence like “an apple is a fruit” have been used in studies on categorization.
Typicality effect
The ability to judge or falsity of sentence involving high-prototypical members of a category more rapidly than sentence involving low-prototypical members of a category.
Exemplar approach to categorization
The approach to categorization in which members of a category are judged against exemplars-examples of members of a category that person have encountered in the past.
Exemplars
In categorization, members of a category that a person has experienced in the past.
Superordinal level
The most general category level distinguished by Rosch-for example, “furniture”
Global level
The highest level in Rosch’s categorization scheme. “Furniture” “vehicle”
The basic level
The level below the global (superordinate) level (e.g., “table” or “chair” for the superordinate category “furniture”. According to Rosch, the basic level is psychological special because it is the level above which much information is lost and below which little is gained.
The subordinate level
The most specific category level distinguishes by Rosch-for example, “kitchen table”
Specific level
In Rosch categorization scheme, the level below the basic level ( e.g, “kitchen table” for the basic category “table”
Semantic network approach
An approach to understand how concepts are organized in the mind that proposes that concepts are arranged in networks
Hierarchical modal
Applied to knowledge representation, a modal that consists of levels arranged so that more specific concepts, such as canary or salmon, are at the bottom and more general concepts, such as birds, fish, or animal, are at higher levels.
Cognitive economy
A feature of some semantic network modales in which properties of a category are stored at higher-level node in the network. For example, the property “can fly” would be stored at the node for “bird” rather than at the node for “cannery”
Spreading activation
Activity that spreads out along any link in a semantic network that is connected to an activated node.
Lexical decision task
A procedure in which a person is asked to decide as quickly as possible wether a particular stimulus is a word or a nonword.
Connectionism
A network model of mental operation that proposes that concepts are represented networks that are modeled after neural networks. Also called the parallel distributing processing (PDP) approach.
Connection network
The type of network proposed by the connectionist approach to the representation of concepts. Connectionist networks are based on neural networks but are not necessarily identical to them.
