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.