Concepts and Categories Flashcards
Why concepts?
They are rich representations
They are interrelated
What does cognitive economy mean?
- helpful in minimizing effort and resources
- increases cognitive processing efficiency for memory, reasoning, communication, creating complex/new concepts, generalizations
- absence of concepts - makes it difficult to exist
How do we form concepts?
- memory of specific past instances
- measure of similarity between past and new instances
Explain concepts
Concepts are mental representations
- typically stable
- typically single word
- related to other concepts
- a way of understanding the world
Explain categories. What kinds of categories exist?
way of grouping things together on the basis of something
- not always stable and can change
kind of categories
- Natural kinds versus artifacts
– natural kinds: grouping that occur naturally
–artifacts - designed or invented by humans
- Stable versus ad hoc
– stable: we agree on what goes in them and what the criteria of inclusion are
– ad hoc: unstable categories defined for a specific purpose of a within a specific context
What is the basic level of categorization
certain types of categories seem to be privileged come first to mind -- superordinate : furniture -- basic level : chair -- subordinate : swivel chair
has its own word not too general and not too specific easy to explain commonalities not necessarily fixed children learn the categories first
Why do we categorize?
- to make inferences about the world
Inductive inferences : general conclusions from specific details
Deductive inferences: reaching a specific conclusion based on general details
Categorization is an inductive inferences
How do we categorize?
- classical theory — rules
- probabilities theory – similarity
- the theory theory – knowledge
Classical theory and its criticism
necessary and sufficient features
necessary - has to be there
sufficient - all that you need
representation = abstract : does not store any information about specific exemplars
criticism
– definition features often can’t be found
Classical theory and its criticism
necessary and sufficient features
necessary - has to be there
sufficient - all that you need
representation = abstract : does not store any information about specific exemplars
criticism
– definition features often can’t be found
Classical theory and its criticism
necessary and sufficient features
necessary - has to be there
sufficient - all that you need
representation = abstract : does not store any information about specific exemplars
criticism
– definition features often can’t be found : cat is a cat regardless of a tail
non-necessary features affect categorization choices
– which shape is a parallelogram
—- people don’t choose a square even though it is a parallelogram
What is family resemblance and typicality?
no defining features that one must havre but there are common/typical features
What is graded membership?
membership is a matter of degree
great number of typical family members
category representation -> probabilistic rather than deterministic
categorization - matter of similarity
What do we mean by typicality effects?
- some members of the category are more typical than others
