Chapter 9- Concepts and Generic Knowledge Flashcards
Family Resemblance:
• Members of a category have features that are common among one another
i.e. most dogs have four legs, fur, bark…etc
Prototype Theory:
• Define a category by specifying the “center” of the category (ideal member of the family)
• Prototype/ideal will be an average of various category members
i.e. Prototype dog is average colour of all dogs, average size,…etc)
Graded Membership:
Objects closer to prototype are better members of the category than objects farther from the prototype
Sentence Verification Task:
• Participants presented with succession of sentences, have to indicated whether each sentence is true or false
Response time was slower for “A penguin is a bird” than “A robin is a bird”
Production Task:
• Participants asked to name as many dogs or birds as they can
Birds close to prototype mentioned first, birds farther from prototype later on
Rating Task
Participants ask to rate how “doggy” each dog is
Basic Level Categorization:
• Basic level categories usually represented via a single word
• More specific categories identified via a phrase
i.e. chair is a basic level category, lawn chair is more specific
Ideal Exemplar Based Reasoning:
• Exemplar being defined as a specific remembered example
• Compare new object to a specific example rather than the prototype
i.e “Is this is chair?” it kind of looks like a the prototype of a chair, and it resembles Bob’s chair (which you know is a chair), so yes, it is a chair
Typicality:
• How similar to the prototype or the ideal examplar is the object
• Category judgments can be independent of typicality (i.e. a painted lemon is still a lemon)
• Inferences about categories guided by typicality
i.e Participant told a new fact about robins, willing to infer this fact is true for all birds
Resemblance:
Depends on shared important, essential properties
Explanatory Theories:
• Provide crucial knowledge base about an object
i.e. See a clothed person jumping into a pool at a party, think they belong in the category “drunk” because theory enables us to think about what a drunk person would do
Natural Kinds:
• Groups of objects that exists naturally in the word
• Properties of these objects are consistent
• i.e mountains, alligators..etc
• People tend to assume more stability with natural kinds
i.e. toaster can be turned into a coffee pot, but a raccoon can’t be turned into a cat
Artifacts:
• Human made objects
• Properties not always constant
Different brain areas activated when thinking about living vs non living objects
Goal Derived Categories:
• Understanding of these concepts depends on understanding of goal
i.e. diet foods
Nonredundancy:
• Instead of storing the fact that cats, birds both have hearts, better to label them both as animals and then have the category “animal” lead to “has a heart”
Not always true- participants respond quickly to sentence like “peacocks have feathers” because it is an essential feature, so a strong association between “peacock” and “feathers” established
