Concepts and thought

Question 1

Define concept

Answer 1

• known as the ‘classical view’
• so it is the intuitive view that most things should be definable by their properties
• concepts can be defined by an exhaustive list of necessary and sufficient semantic features
• mental representations of concepts are composed of lists of semantic features which jointly determine category membership

Question 2

What are difficulties with the idea of a concept?

Answer 2

• It is difficult to come up with an exhaustive list of features for a given concept
  -E.g family resemblance theory by Rosch - all members of a can seem to resemble each other, however none of the members have all the features (e.g glasses big nose etc)
• If you create another family member with all features, he would be a mental prototype

Question 3

What did Rosch say about prototypes?

Answer 3

• We organise our mental representations of a conceptual category around the average of the various instances we are familiar with
• So there is a graded membership, meaning some membership are closer to the prototype than others
• Conceptual categories have fuzzy boundaries so there is no clear dividing line which would indicate membership

Question 4

What are typicality ratings?

Answer 4

• A measure of how well a specific item or concept is considered a representative member of a category
  -The rating can be obtained through sentence verification tasks (1-7), l meaning in category
  -The longer it takes for the sentence verification tasks, the more unlikely it is to be in category

Question 5

What is prototype theory?

Answer 5

• When we make a category judgement on a new instance, we compare it to a mental representation of a prototype

Question 6

What is exemplar theory?

Answer 6

• When we make a category judgement of a new instance, we compare it to the stored instances of all other members of the category

Question 7

Where are prototypes and exemplars used in the brain?

Answer 7

• Evidence from neuro-maging and acquired brain damage suggests that the brain might use both prototype and exemplar-bases strategies when categorising instances
• The visual cortex involves prototypical mental representations
• The prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia is involved in learning exemplars

Question 8

What is economics and homo economicus?

Answer 8

• Economics is a discipline which explores how people interact when they exchange goods and services
• ‘Homo economicus’ or ‘economic person” is an imagined person which has an infinite ability to make rational decisions
  Modern economics in a globalised world basically means all of us engage in a global exchange of goods and services, ultimately driven by rational self-interest

Question 9

What is behavioural economics:

Answer 9

• Behavioural economics studies the effects of psychological, cognitive, cultural, emotional and social factors on the decisions of individuals and institutions

Question 10

What are heuristics and biases?

Answer 10

• In many situations, it is difficult and slow to work though all the options to make a ‘rational’ decision
• In these cases, people often apply heuristics, which are mental shortcuts or ‘rules of thumb’ when having to make an effective decision fast
• These heuristics can often be wrong, which leads to biases or tendencies which violate rationality

Question 11

What is availability bias?

Answer 11

• Availability bias is the probability estimate of occurrence which is judged by its availability in memory
• So basically a person evaluates the frequency of class or the probability of evens by availability e.g by the ease with which the relevant instances come to mind
• e.g following 9/11, many Americans switched from air to road travel
• However humans are quite poor at estimating very low-probability events, e.g especially when there’s high risk

Question 12

What is conjunction fallacy

Answer 12

• a cognitive bias where people mistakenly judge the probability of two events happening together (a conjunction) to be higher than the probability of either event occurring alone.
• The combines probability of two events is always less than the independent probability of each event
• The more and more pieces of info available, the less likely the join probability is to hold, however people typically believe the opposite