Chapter 9- Knowledge

Question 1

What is conceptual knowledge?

Answer 1

Knowledge that enables us to recognize objects and events and to make inferences about their properties.

Question 2

How do we define concepts?

Answer 2

“Mental representation of a class or individual” & “categories of objects, events, and abstract ideas”

Question 3

What is a category?

Answer 3

All possible examples of a particular concept.

Question 4

What is categorization?

Answer 4

The process by which things are placed into categories

Question 5

What are the 3 approaches to categorization?
What have they taught us (provide a brief summary of each)?

Answer 5

1. Behavioural approach - helped us understand how we place objects in different categories and that “not all objects are created equal”
2. Network approach - inspired by the emerging field of computer science, created computer models of how categories are represented in the mind.
3. Physiological approach - looks at the relationships between categories and the brain

Question 6

What is family resemblance?

Answer 6

Things in a particular category resemble one another in a number of ways.

This approach allows variability within a category.

Question 7

What are the 4 approaches to categorization?

Answer 7

1. Prototype
2. Exemplar
3. Semantic
4. Connectionist

Question 8

What is the prototype approach to categorization?

Answer 8

Membership in a category is determined by comparing the object to a prototype that represents the category.

Question 9

What is a prototype?

Answer 9

A ‘typical’ member of the category. Based on the average of members of a category that are commonly experienced.

NOT an actual member of the category but is an ‘average’ representation of the category.

Question 10

What do we mean by “typicality”?

Answer 10

Variations within categories as representing differences “typicality”.

Question 11

What is high typicality?

Answer 11

Means that a category member closely resembles the category prototype.

Question 12

What does low typicality mean?

Answer 12

The category member does not closely resemble a typical member of the category.

Question 13

What does it mean to have high family resemblance?

Answer 13

When an item’s characteristics have a large amount of overlap with the characteristics of many other items in a category.

Question 14

What does it mean to have low family resemblance?

Answer 14

Little overlap with the characteristics of other members of a category

Question 15

Prototypical Objects have…

Answer 15

High family resemblance

Question 16

What is the sentence verification technique?

Answer 16

Participants are presented with statements and are asked to answer “yes” if they think it’s true or “no” if they think it is not.

Question 17

What procedures were used to test the prototypical approach? (3)

Answer 17

1. Sentence verification task (typicality effect)
2. Production task
3. Priming

Question 18

Why did they use the sentence verification technique to test for prototypicality?

Results?

Answer 18

To determine how rapidly people could answer questions about an object’s category.

Results: Participants responded faster for objects that are high in prototypicality.

(Ex: highly prototypical for fruit category = apple, low in prototypicality = pomegranate)

Question 19

What is the ability to judge highly prototypical objects more rapidly called?

Answer 19

The typicality effect

Question 20

What are the keys indicators at how we categorize objects in the prototype approach? (4)

Answer 20

1. Prototypical objects have high family resemblance
2. Statements about Prototypical objects are verified rapidly
3. Prototypical objects are named first
4. Prototypical objects are affected more by priming

Question 21

What is the procedure used to confirm prototypical objects are named first? Results?

Answer 21

Production task; in which participants are asked to list as many objects as possible in a given category.

Results = participants answered with the most prototypical members of the category first.

(Ex: birds category - sparrow would be named before penguin)

** the first item in the production task should be the item with the fastest response time from the sentence verification task

Question 22

What is priming?

Answer 22

Priming occurs when presentation of one stimulus facilitates the response to another stimulus that usually follows closely in time.

Question 23

Which procedure was used to demonstrate how priming affected prototypical objects?

Results?

Answer 23

Rosch’s priming experiment: prime = “green” heard
3 conditions:
1. Same pigmented green
2. Same poor examples of green (too light)
3. Different colors
Participants must click as fast as possible on whether they are the same colour or not buttons.

Results = priming resulted in faster “same” judgments for the prototypical (good) colors than for the nonprototypical colors (poor)

-participants create images of prototypes in response to colour names.

*NOTE; this experiment provided evidence that all items within a category are not the same.

Question 24

What is the exemplar approach to categorization?

What is the difference between the exemplar approach and the prototype approach?

Answer 24

Determining whether an object is similar to other objects.

Difference: involves many examples, each one called an exemplar, whereas the prototype approach is a single “average” member of the category.

Question 25

What are exemplars?

Answer 25

Actual members of the category that a person has encountered in the past.

Ex: if i have encountered sparrows, Blue Jays, robins, etc, each would be an exemplar for the category “birds”.

Question 26

How can we explain the exemplar approach?

Answer 26

The more similar a specific exemplar is to a known member, the faster will be categorized (family ressemblance effect)

Question 27

Compare and contrast the pros and cons for the exemplar and prototypical approaches?

Answer 27

Pros:
exemplar approach, using real examples accounts for atypical cases such as flightless birds rather than comparing a penguin to an “average” bird.

Exemplar approach deals more easily with variable categories like games. (Football, computer games, marbles, golf, etc.)

Cons:
prototype approach is too rigid.

Question 28

What is hierarchical organization?

Important!

Answer 28

A kind of organization, in which larger, more general categories are divided into smaller, more specific categories, creating a number of levels of categories.

Question 29

Rosch’s approach: What is special about basic level categories?

(Bird experiment- experts vs nonexperts)

Answer 29

Basic level categories helped in understanding that to fully understand how people organize objects, we need to consider not only the properties of the object but also the learning and experience of the people perceiving those objects.

Question 30

What is the semantic network approach?

Answer 30

Proposes that concepts are arranged in networks

Question 31

How is the Semantic network model by Collins and Quillian constructed?

Answer 31

Network consists of nodes that are connected by links.

Each node represents a category/concept.

Concepts are placed in the network so that related concepts are connected.

A number of properties are indicated for each concept.

The link connecting the concepts indicate how they are related to each other in the mind.

Cognitive economy (makes network more efficient) - because properties are nodes higher, so it saves storage place in the mind.

It is a hierarchical model.

Question 32

What is the purpose of the semantic network model by Collins and Quillian?

Answer 32

To indicate how concepts and their properties are associated in the mind, and to make predictions about how we retrieve properties associated with a concept.

Prediction regarding retrieval was confirmed due to longer reaction times for further travel in the model.

Question 33

What is spreading activation?
And what is the result of this spreading activation?

Answer 33

Activity that spreads out along any link that is connected to an activated node.

Results = additional concepts that receive this activation become “primed” and so can be retrieved more easily from memory.

Question 34

What is the Connectionist Approach?

Answer 34

Connectionism is an approach to creating computer models for representing cognitive processes.

Question 35

What are artifacts (non living things) and living things distinguished by?

Answer 35

Living things = sensory properties (ex: perceiving stripes and spots on animals)
Artifacts = function

Question 36

What is the sensory- functional hypothesis?

Answer 36

States that our ability to differentiate livings things and artifacts depends on a memory system that distinguishes sensory attributes and a system that distinguishes functions.

Question 37

What is the multiple- factor approach?

Answer 37

Distributed representation is a central feature of the multiple-factor approach.