Concepts - Chapter 7 Content

Question 1

Define a concept.

Answer 1

A mental representation of some object, event or pattern that has stores in it much of the knowledge typically thought relevant to that object, event or pattern. (examples is when thinking of a dog, you also think of animal, 4 legs and fur)

Question 2

Define category.

Answer 2

A class of similar things that share one or two things: either an essential core or perceptual, biological or functional properties. Help to establish order in our knowledge base and categories giving us mental buckets to sort info.

Question 3

What is the classical view of concepts?

Answer 3

This is organised around the belief that all examples or instances of a concept share fundamental characteristics or features. It holds that the features represented are individually necessary (need to have) and sufficient (if they have). Also shows that the things in the categories are all equal and they have the same defining characteristics.

Question 4

Explain the prototype view on concepts.

Answer 4

This denies the existence of necessary features on a list and instead regards concepts as a collection of features that are characteristics. They focus on the idea of mental prototypes and how these hold features that are typical for the category but not necessary. There is high and low prototypicality.

Question 5

How is the family resembalance structure of concepts related to a specific view of concepts?

Answer 5

It is related to the prototype view as it is a structure of a family where each member has a number of features and can share them with each other, but there is never one defining trait seen in each person. The idea is that the more features in common, the stronger the family resemblance (high prototypicality)

Question 6

How are prototypes mental summaries?

Answer 6

A prototype often included all characteristic features of a category. Making it a mental summary or average of the general things.

Question 7

What are the 3 levels of categorization?

Answer 7

1. Superordinate - grouping together basic level items such as piano and guitar which are different on many aspects but can be grouped into a large category
2. Basic - grouping together based on category with objects, people, and ideas
3. Subordinate - Less distinct categories such as grand and upright piano

pg 207 in textbook for examples

Question 8

What are some problems with the prototype view?

Answer 8

• crossing boundaries between categories because of the way these objects work in the environment
• typically rating depends on the context, is not a fixed process

Question 9

What is the exemplar view of concepts?

Answer 9

it asserts the concepts include representations composed of a previous instance called exemplars. Categorization occurs by comparing the current instance to the exemplars in memory. Understand using the builder and digger experiment were people were given a rule to follow but still made a mistake as they were comparing it to previous exemplars and not the given rule.

Question 10

What is the schemata view of concepts?

Answer 10

This focuses on the fact that concepts are schemtatas and they are embedded into another hierarchically. this is shown to has some sharing features with the prototype and exemplar view of concepts.

Question 11

What is the knowledge-based view of concepts?

Answer 11

This evolves around the idea that the relationship between a concept and examples is analogues to the relationship between a theory and data supporting it. This is when a person is classifying objects and events and doesn’t compare features or physical aspects of the object to stored representations, just uses their knowledge to justify the chosen category.
- categories can become coherent when you know them only by the purpose of the category

Question 12

Describe the simultaneous scanning strategy.

Answer 12

This required the participants to test several hypothesis at the same time, holding multiple dimensions in the mind at once. this was a very heavy demanding task on your working memory.

Question 13

Describe the successive scanning strategy.

Answer 13

this is where the participants tested one hypothesis at a time (single dimension for multiple trails), this was less efficient but more cognitively manageable.

Question 14

Describe the conservative focusing strategy.

Answer 14

Finding a card that illustrated the concepts (focus card) and using that to test other cards that varied in only one aspect from the focus card. This is both efficient and easy to do.

Question 15

define implicit learning.

Answer 15

This requires people to pay attention to individual exemplars, storing information and representations of them in memory

Question 16

What are the 5 factors that lead people to store info about individual exemplars?

Answer 16

1. task requirement to learn info that distinguishes amount individual instances
2. original learning situation
3. some stimuli lend themselves to hypothesis testing better than others
4. instances may belong to a number of categories all at the same time
5. in nature setting, we learn instances without knowing how we will be called to use that info later

Question 17

What are the 3 kinds of concepts?

Answer 17

Nominal - concepts that have clear definitions
Natural - naturally occurring in the environment
Artefact - things constructed to serve a function or accomplish some task

Question 18

What part of long-term memory is categorization mostly occurring in?

Answer 18

Semantic Memory

Question 19

What is a mental representation?

Answer 19

How things are stored in our minds but sometimes are not an accurate representation of how they are in real life.

Question 20

Define categorization.

Answer 20

A process by which things are placed into groups called categories.

Question 21

What is the purpose of categorization?

Answer 21

• understands things you haven’t seen before and is able to make inferences about them
• reduce the level of complexity in your environment (can cause over-generalizing/false inferences such as thinking that all dog bites and that make them mean)
• require less learning
  guide to appropriate action (ex. seeing a shark versus a dolphin fin)

Question 22

What are the 2 main problems with the classical view?

Answer 22

1. there is no defining feature for many natural kind categories (there are many similarities but no defining feature like saying that all dogs have fur would be inaccurate)
2. typically (people tend to judge members of a category as differing in goodness)

Question 23

How do overlapping features predict typicality?

Answer 23

An example is when thinking about different kinds of fruit, with an apple and orange there are many overlapping features such as sweet and round. So these will have a high prototypicality making it easier to know they are fruits. but then if we think of a coconut, there are not very many features that are similar to an apple or orange making it have low typicality even when it is still a fruit. more typical things that we have seen from our experiences determine if something has a higher prototypicality or not.

Question 24

What are some pros and cons of exemplar view of concepts?

Answer 24

PROS: helps to explain why we cannot define things, just have to use instances. Also helps to understand typically and how the more similar things are to exemplars stored, the easier it is to classify
CONS: doesn’t specify what exemplar will be used when categorizing and it states we have to store a lot of examples

Question 25

What are pros and cons of schemata view?

Answer 25

Pros: involves both abstract instances (prototype) and info about actually instances (exemplar)
Cons: does not specific boundaries of when you go from one schemata to another

Question 26

What was the experiment used to demonstrate the 3 types of strategies used when identifying new concepts?

Answer 26

There were 3 sets of stimuli presented on cars, one group with different shapes, one with different colours and one with different borders. Participants were given an instance of a concept without knowledge of what the actual concept was (needed to create/learn the concept). They then chose other cards and got feedback to try to learn the concept. This was an explicit/conscious strategy.

Question 27

How was the learning phase shown with implicit learning?

Answer 27

They took letter strings that had no grammatical sense and just had random sequences of letters. It was shown that if the letters follow a rule, they were much more likely to be remembered than letter strings that did not follow a rule. Since this was an implicit/unconscious task, the participants had no idea what rule they were following but the rule still increased their performance.

Question 28

What sides of the brain are used in category representation?

Answer 28

RIGHT: in initial learning, stimuli could only be processed as specific visual patterns in the right prefrontal and parietal (visual and spatial processing)

LEFT: After learning, people were able to abstract general properties with the left parietal and generate reasons with their left prefrontal (verbal processing)