Chapter 9- Knowledge Flashcards
What is conceptual knowledge?
Knowledge that enables us to recognize objects and events and to make inferences about their properties.
How do we define concepts?
“Mental representation of a class or individual” & “categories of objects, events, and abstract ideas”
What is a category?
All possible examples of a particular concept.
What is categorization?
The process by which things are placed into categories
What are the 3 approaches to categorization?
What have they taught us (provide a brief summary of each)?
- Behavioural approach - helped us understand how we place objects in different categories and that “not all objects are created equal”
- Network approach - inspired by the emerging field of computer science, created computer models of how categories are represented in the mind.
- Physiological approach - looks at the relationships between categories and the brain
What is family resemblance?
Things in a particular category resemble one another in a number of ways.
This approach allows variability within a category.
What are the 4 approaches to categorization?
- Prototype
- Exemplar
- Semantic
- Connectionist
What is the prototype approach to categorization?
Membership in a category is determined by comparing the object to a prototype that represents the category.
What is a prototype?
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.
What do we mean by “typicality”?
Variations within categories as representing differences “typicality”.
What is high typicality?
Means that a category member closely resembles the category prototype.
What does low typicality mean?
The category member does not closely resemble a typical member of the category.
What does it mean to have high family resemblance?
When an item’s characteristics have a large amount of overlap with the characteristics of many other items in a category.
What does it mean to have low family resemblance?
Little overlap with the characteristics of other members of a category
Prototypical Objects have…
High family resemblance
What is the sentence verification technique?
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.
What procedures were used to test the prototypical approach? (3)
- Sentence verification task (typicality effect)
- Production task
- Priming
Why did they use the sentence verification technique to test for prototypicality?
Results?
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)
What is the ability to judge highly prototypical objects more rapidly called?
The typicality effect
What are the keys indicators at how we categorize objects in the prototype approach? (4)
- Prototypical objects have high family resemblance
- Statements about Prototypical objects are verified rapidly
- Prototypical objects are named first
- Prototypical objects are affected more by priming
What is the procedure used to confirm prototypical objects are named first? Results?
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
What is priming?
Priming occurs when presentation of one stimulus facilitates the response to another stimulus that usually follows closely in time.
Which procedure was used to demonstrate how priming affected prototypical objects?
Results?
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.
What is the exemplar approach to categorization?
What is the difference between the exemplar approach and the prototype approach?
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.
What are exemplars?
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”.
How can we explain the exemplar approach?
The more similar a specific exemplar is to a known member, the faster will be categorized (family ressemblance effect)
Compare and contrast the pros and cons for the exemplar and prototypical approaches?
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.
What is hierarchical organization?
Important!
A kind of organization, in which larger, more general categories are divided into smaller, more specific categories, creating a number of levels of categories.
Rosch’s approach: What is special about basic level categories?
(Bird experiment- experts vs nonexperts)
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.
What is the semantic network approach?
Proposes that concepts are arranged in networks
How is the Semantic network model by Collins and Quillian constructed?
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.
What is the purpose of the semantic network model by Collins and Quillian?
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.
What is spreading activation?
And what is the result of this spreading activation?
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.
What is the Connectionist Approach?
Connectionism is an approach to creating computer models for representing cognitive processes.
What are artifacts (non living things) and living things distinguished by?
Living things = sensory properties (ex: perceiving stripes and spots on animals)
Artifacts = function
What is the sensory- functional hypothesis?
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.
What is the multiple- factor approach?
Distributed representation is a central feature of the multiple-factor approach.
