conceptii Flashcards
What are concepts?
Concepts are stored mental representations which serve to designate a category for different things.
It is how we organise experiences and how we think about the world.
Why do we need concepts?
Because they help us with knowing what we are supposed to do when we encounter new things.
How do we organise concepts?
We need 2 aspects:
Necessity: what are the necessary features for an object to be in a category
Sufficiency: those features have to be sufficient in order to decide that this thing is a member of a category
What is one theory that explains concepts?
“Family resemblance theory.”
Shared features that exist among members of the category are sufficient to form a category even if no single one of those features is present in every face e.g. not all men need a beard to be a classified as a man
Members of the category that have the most attributes in common have the highest family resemblance.
What is another theory to explain concepts?
Prototype theory (Rosch)
Concepts are organised around typicality
Typical member of a bird: pigeon
Pigeon is the prototype - they have all the features that we would consider to be typical of a bird
Members that share at least a few of those features belong in the bird category.
Prototypes posses all of the features of the category.
What is a third theory of concepts?
Exemplar theory (Medin and Schaffer)
Make judgements about categories by comparing new instances with stored memories of other instances.
If you see a breed of a dog that you have never seen before, you are going to compare it with a memory of a dog you have seen before.
What are category-specific deficits?
Developed by Warrington and McCarthy
Stroke patients could not recognise human made objects but they had knowledge of living things and food.
What is a major part of the brain that is involved in recognising tools?
The motor cortex.
Having a stroke in that area is going to affect your perceptual understanding of tools.
What parts of the brain are active when looking at animals?
Visual cortex and temporal lobe.
How are the meanings of objects and events represented and organised in the brain?
Amodal view
Embodied view
What is amodal view? - to do with physical symbols systems hypothesis
The view that concepts are abstract things, and they don’t have a sensory motor element to them.
When acquiring a concept of the world, we interact with it through our senses (smell), but once that concept is stored in our brain, it is stored in an abstract fashion.
What is embodied view?
The view that concepts are modal.
Concepts are stored in our brain in a modality specific sensory motor format. (they are stored in the same way we have perceived them in the real world)
When we represent a concept, we are reusing the same regions and functions that we were using when encountering that object in the world.
What is some evidence for the embodied view?
They asked people to read words that implied movement of different parts of the body. E.g the word eat corresponded with face.
They found overlap between words that denote actions from those parts of the body and actually producing words with those parts of the body.
