Chapter 9: Concepts and Generic Knowledge

Question 1

Familiar resemblance

Answer 1

The idea that members of a category resemble each other (shared features that may shift over time)

Question 2

Prototype

Answer 2

A single “best example” of a category
(E.g. A golden retriever may be the prototypical dog)

Question 3

Typicality

Answer 3

Degree to which a particular case is typical for its kind

Question 4

Graded membership

Answer 4

The idea that some members of a category are better members and therefore are more firmly in that category than other members

Question 5

Sentence verification task

Answer 5

Experimental procedure used for studying memory in which participants are given simple sentences and most respond as quickly as possible whether the sentences is true or false

Question 6

Production task

Answer 6

Participants are asked to name as many examples as possible

Question 7

Rating task

Answer 7

Task in which participants must evaluate some item or category with reference to some dimension

EX: Evaluate how “birdy” these birds are on a scale from 1 to 7

Question 8

Basic-level categorization

Answer 8

Level of categorization hypothesized as the “natural” and most informative level, neither too specific nor too general

E.g. “chair” over “armchair” and “furniture”

Question 9

Exemplar-based reasoning

Answer 9

Reasoning that draws on knowledge about specific category members (exemplars) rather than on general information about the overall category

Question 10

Anomia

Answer 10

Disorder arising from specific forms of brain damage, in which the person loses their ability to name certain objects

Question 11

Hub and spoke model

Answer 11

Proposal for how concepts may be represented in the brain

“Hub” = tissue in anterior temporal lobes (integrates info from many brain areas)

“Spokes” = represent more specific elements of the concept (e.g. visual info, action info, etc.)

Question 12

Propositions

Answer 12

Smallest unit of knowledge that can be either true or false

Question 13

Connectionist networks

Answer 13

Proposed systems of knowledge representation that rely on distributed representations and that therefore require parallel distributed processing to operate on the elements of a representation

Question 14

Parallel distributed processing PDP

Answer 14

System of handling information in which many steps happen at once and in which various aspects of the problem or task are represented only in a distributed way