Chapter 9 Flashcards
conceptual knowledge
- helps with recognition and generating inferences
- enables people to recognize objects and events and to make inferences about their properties
concepts
- mental representation of an object, event, or abstract ideas
- e.g. how someone mentally represents a “cat” or “house”
category
- examples of a concept that are grouped together
- e.g. category of “cats” includes tabbies, Siamese cats, Persian cats, leopards, etc
categorization
- process of building and placing things in a category
- categorization not only helps understand what is happening in the environment, it also plays an essential role in enabling us to take action
approaches to categorization
- definitional approach
- family resemblance
- prototype approach
- exemplar approach
definitional approach
- categorization based on definition of the category
- each member of a category needs to meet the same/set criteria
- e.g. “a square is a plane figure having four equal sides, with all internal angles the same”
- the problem is that not all of the members of everyday categories have the same features
familial resemblance
- categorization based on ways they resemble each other
- each feature of objects within a category do no need to match
- allows for some variation within a category
prototype approach
- strategy of category selection based on similarity with a prototype
- an “average” representation of the category
- individuals generate their own prototype for a category but people often have similar prototypes
- variations within categories as representing differences in typicality
prototype
a “typical” member of the category
high typicality
a category member closely resembles the category prototype
low typicality
the category member does not closely resemble a typical member of the category
typicality effect
faster to verify prototypical/typical members as belonging to a category than non prototypical/less typical members
sentence verification technique
- participant is asked to indicate whether a particular sentence is true or false
- determine how rapidly people could answer questions about na objects category
- used by Edward Smith at al. (1974)
prototypical members and priming
- prototypical members of a category are more affected by a priming stimulus than are non prototypical members
- priming results in faster “same” judgments for the prototypical objects
exemplar approach
- strategy of category selection based on the greatest similarity between an item in category and the novel item
- members of a category are judged against examples
- examples of members of the category that the person has encountered in the past
- selecting the category with an exemplar that is the closest match the the item that is to be categorized
- can deal with more variable categories
exemplars
- actual members of the category that a person has encountered in the past
- e.g. if a person has encountered sparrows, robins, and blue jays in the past, each of these would be an exemplar for the category “birds.”
hierarchal organization
- organization of categories in which larger, more general categories are divided into smaller, more specific categories
- these smaller categories can, in turn, be divided into even more specific categories to create a number of levels
categories of Roschs hierarchal organization
- superordinate/global category
- basic-level category
- subordinate category
superordinate global category
- top of the hierarchy
- contain many category members
- broad and varied, meaning one can’t generate a prototype at the superordinate level
- most general category level
- lack similarity
- e.g. fridge and a desk = both furniture but not similar
basic-level category
- in the middle of the hierarchy
- often the first words learned and the type of words used daily belong at the basic-level category
- categories are the most differentiated at this level
- items within the basic-level category are similar (guitar and harp)
- items in different basic-level categories are dissimilar (guitar vs. apple)
- categorization is fastest at this level
subordinate category
- bottom of the hierarchy
- fewest amount of category members/items
- most specific category level
- e.g. rocking chair, bean bag chair, dining chair → there’s only so many type of rocking chairs or dining chairs
exceptions to Roschs hierarchal organization/categorization
- exceptions are the experts in a field
- e.g. if there’s a birdwatcher thy would be able to categories items at the subordinate level very quickly, like categorizing a type of sparrow
semantic network approach
an approach to understanding how concepts are organized in the mind that proposes that concepts are arranged in networks
hierarchal model
as applied to knowledge representation, a model that consists of levels arranged so that more specific concepts