Chapter 9 Terms: Concepts and General Knowledge Flashcards
Family Resemblance
The idea that members of a category (e.g., all dogs, all games) resemble one another. In general, family resemblance relies on some number of features being shared by any subset of category members, even though these features may not be shared by all members of the category. Therefore, the basis for family resemblance may shift from one subset of the category to another.
Prototype
A single “best example,” or average, identifying the “center” of a category.
Typicality
The degree to which a particular case (an object, situation, or event) is typical for its kind.
Graded Membership
The idea that some members of a category are “better” members, and therefore are more firmly in the category than other members.
Sentence Verification Task
An experiment procedure used for studying memory in which participants are given simple sentences (e.g., “cats are animals”) and must respond as quickly as possible whether the sentence is true or false.
Production Task
An experiment procedure used in studying concepts, in which the participant is asked to name as many examples (e.g., as many fruits) as possible.
Rating Tasks
A task in which research participants must evaluate some item or category with reference to some dimension, usually expressing their response in terms of some number. For example, they might be asked to evaluate birds for how typical they are within the category “birds,” using a “1” response to indicate “very typical” and a “7” response to indicate “very typical”.
Basic-Level Categorization
A level of categorization hypothesized as the “natural” and most informative level, neither too specific nor too general. People tend to use basic-level terms (such as “chair,” rather than the more general “furniture” or the more specific “armchair”) in their ordinary conversation and in their reasoning.
Examplar-Based Reasoning
Reasoning that draws on knowledge about specific category members, or exemplars, rather than drawing on more general information about the overall category.
Anomia
A disorder, often arising from specific forms of brain damage, in which the person loses the ability to name certain objects.
Hub and Spoke Model
A proposal for how concepts might be represented in the brain, with tissue in the anterior temporal lobes serving as the “hub” – a brain location that connects and integrates information from many other brain areas. The “spokes” represent more specific elements of the concept – with (for example) visual information relevant to the concept stored in visual areas; relevant action information stored in motor areas; and so on.
Propositions
The smallest unit of knowledge that can be either true or false. Propositions are often expressed via simple sentences, but this is merely a convenience, other modes of representation are available.
Connectionist Networks
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.
Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP)
A system of handling information in which many steps happen at once (i.e., in parallel) and in which various aspects of the problem or task are represented only in a distributed way.
