Chapter 6: Categories, Concepts & Essences

Question 1

What is the example about going to the zoo?

Answer 1

some things are universal (animals- even if some are foreign to us) and others are not (private property, paid entry)

Question 2

What is perceptual categorization?

Answer 2

an implicit classification of perceptual stimuli into discrete sets, despite a lack of physical discontinuity in the array. For example, colours, facial expressions, and sounds. We perceive these as perceptually distinct.
* it is the relatively fast change in perception associated with a gradual change in physical characteristics

Question 3

Define a category

Answer 3

a mentally represented grouping of entities (objects, people, actions or events).

Question 4

Name 2 misconceptions about the function of categories as well as the true function

Answer 4

To relieve memory load? We remember groups and individual items (calendars, friend groups)
Because we couldn’t remember everything? We have 10^15 brain synapses. The brain potential is there.
The true function of categories is to make inferences!

Question 5

What is the Classical view of categories?

Answer 5

categories could be described by a list of necessary and sufficient features.
There should never be any ambiguity about category membership

Question 6

What challenges the classic category view?

Answer 6

• a raccoon with three legs would not meet the criteria for raccoon category membership
• asking to list criteria needed for something to be a game
• unequal category membership, some things are better examples than others (prototype view)

Question 7

What did Piaget conclude from free association? What did he conclude about hierarchies?

Answer 7

• thought kids were perceptually bound. Instead they made thematic associations; evidence of cognitive immaturity.
• Class-inclusion experiments (are there more red flowers or flowers?) led to conclusion that kids are unable to reason about different hierarchical classes. 8 year olds struggle with this task

Question 8

What are the 2 levels of hierarchical organization?

Answer 8

superordinate: more general
subordinate: more specific

Question 9

A hierarchy of nested category relationships allows for…

Answer 9

even greater inferential power.

Question 10

What is a basic level category? Is there really such thing as a basic level category? What is a child basic category?

Answer 10

• A category that is most easily processed, first learned by children, and within which inferences are more generously drawn
• No. Our minds perceive some things to be more basic than others (a case of instinct blindness)
• A child basic category is more general than adults.

Question 11

Define a concept

Answer 11

A concept is a psychological grouping together of entities, objects, events or characteristics, based on some more or less functional commonality, including some taxonomic relationship.

Question 12

What is the main difference between categories and concepts?

Answer 12

A concept is like a category but richer. Concepts are stronger sources of inference because entities in a concept are functionally related.

Question 13

What is a natural kind category?

Answer 13

a psychological grouping of the classes of entities that are seen to be natural categories. Objects grouped together as they are perceived to be in nature.

Question 14

Explain how induction experiments tell us about kids’ understanding of natural kinds. How does this challenge Piaget?

Answer 14

Kids (at 4 years) make inductions within natural kinds categories (a bird will have cold legs at night like a flamingo, not like a similar looking bat) despite Piaget’s prediction that they would connect two similar looking animals
* Even kids at 2.5 years don’t rely on perceptual similarity

Question 15

Define essentialism

Answer 15

the intuition that for any given entity there is an essence- some property that every member of that kind must possess- which gives it its category membership and its category-specific features.
* Children as young as 4 years have essentialist ideas. This develops between 4 and 7

Question 16

Explain what transformation experiments tell us about essentialism

Answer 16

we have essentialist thinking more so about natural kinds and not about arbitrary things. Kids are more accepting of a transformation between objects but not between animals.
* the transformation must be convincing enough to fool a child. Some 4 year olds fall for this otherwise

Question 17

As early as _______ infants have some species-specific concepts of animals. At ________ infants have the category “mammal”

Answer 17

3 months; 3.5 months

Question 18

What process explains conceptual change?

Answer 18

Quinian bootstrapping. Carey proposed this allows for conceptual change.
A new concept is assigned a symbolic placeholder and is enriched by making connections between new and old frameworks.

Question 19

Prerequisites for Quinian bootstrapping

Answer 19

• when child’s predictions fail
• domain-general cognitive skills ie. language, memory, information processing capacity
• children and scientists use this but infants cannot

Question 20

Name 3 things about our relationship with concepts

Answer 20

• instinct blind (we don’t notice the ones we have or the ones we don’t)
• uniformity (including social and mental entities like deception, integrity, love etc)
• universality (predator-prey is one of the earliest concepts)

Question 21

_______ matters in early category formation

Answer 21

function.
Children who were given functional information about a pretend animal were better able to categorize them and remember them.

Question 22

What is the evolutionary psychology view about categorization?

Answer 22

The psychological processes underlying category formation were selected for by NS.
Core concepts that reliably develop are those that were relevant in the EEA.

Question 23

Define complex

Answer 23

a grouping that is more fluid and less well defined than a category and that does not rely on classic definitions. Piaget thought young children had these.

Question 24

Kids make inferences from _____ level to _______ level, but not the reverse

Answer 24

basic; subordinate

A fact about birds should apply to a robin, but a fact about a robin may not apply to all birds

Question 25

Uniformity of development suggests that…

Answer 25

concept formation must be constrained, privileging some hypotheses over others.

Question 26

What is functional fixedness?

Answer 26

the difficulty in trying to think of an item being used for a different purpose than it was designed.
*5 year olds do not demonstrate this