Emergence and abstract concepts

Question 1

What is a concept?

Answer 1

The information in your head about a category.

Question 2

Formation of concepts/categories allows novel experiences to be understood via ________.

Answer 2

Formation of concepts/categories allows novel experiences to be understood via induction.

Question 3

What is the see-think-act paradigm?

Answer 3

You have perception, and take that input into your head as representation. You reason with it and it tells you how to act.

Question 4

If there are no concepts, how is knowledge constructed, according to Smith?

Answer 4

Knowledge has no existence separate from process. Instead, it is embedded in and inseparable from real-time processes.

Question 5

Smith’s dynamic systems approach follows what kind of model – modular, degenerate or random?

Answer 5

Degenerate –lots of local connectivity and less connectivity across areas.

Modular is too rigid to allow for open-ended learning. Random has no stability.

Question 6

What is activated by a word meaning?

Answer 6

Sensory systems all over the brain. e.g. kick activates motor cortex, canary activates yellow in visual cortex.

Question 7

What makes humans so smart, according to Smith?

Answer 7

Multi-sensory integration. We can integrate information across complex systems – building regularities upon regularities. e.g. babies can overcome fear of visual cliff by handling transparent objects.

Question 8

What is the shape bias?

Answer 8

Bias such that when infants encounter a new word, they expect it to generalise on the basis of shape.

Question 9

How does the shape bias develop? 4 steps

Answer 9

1. Learn specific word object associations – e.g. that thing is a ball
2. make first-order generalisations for each specific category – e.g. balls are ball-shaped, cups are cup-shaped
3. make higher-order generalisations across the regularities discovered in those first-order generalisations – e.g. X is X-shaped
4. use these higher-order generalisations to rapidly learn new categories

Question 10

How is a word learnt, according to a dynamic systems approach?

Answer 10

A lexical form is associated with a multi-sensory pattern of activation.

Question 11

How does the shape bias accelerate word learning?

Answer 11

Children understand that objects with similar shape have the same label –can go out and start learning the labels.

Question 12

What is the dynamic systems account of how language works?

Answer 12

Language has its own sets of correlations, such that words distributed in the same way have similar meanings.

E.g. ‘carrot’ and ‘celery’ are distributed in the same way in language.

Question 13

How does the dynamic systems approach account for symbolic thought?

Answer 13

In using symbolic systems such as language, humans employ the same kind of computations as they do for the physical world, but they operate over these symbols directly.

Question 14

What is Gentner’s natural partitions hypothesis?

Answer 14

We parse the world into objects (well defined perceptually) and relations between them (less well defined).

Question 15

Across languages, children form categories of _______ before they form categories of ________.

Answer 15

Across languages, children form categories of objects before they form categories of relations.

Question 16

What is the relational shift in ‘the career of similarity’? (Gentner, 1991)

Answer 16

Humans start off seeing similarity just between features, then between objects, then between relations.

Question 17

___________ relational structure is often extended to shape _________ conceptual domains. e.g., long and short amounts of time, in love, on a roll

Answer 17

Spatial relational structure is often extended to shape

abstract conceptual domains. e.g., long and short amounts of time, in love, on a roll

Question 18

How does giving things a common label affect the way we process them?

Answer 18

A common label makes us more likely to compare them and abstract their commonalities.

Question 19

Relational words _______ relational systems.

Answer 19

Relational words reify relational systems.

Question 20

What evidence is there that relational labelling helps form stable relational representations?

Answer 20

Homesigners without spatial (relational) language have poor spatial skills.

Question 21

What are the two systems of core knowledge for number, according to Carey?

Answer 21

1. Precise number of small sets –can distinguish 2 dots from 3 dots
2. Analog magnitude scale – can distinguish large quantities from others, but only vaguely. E.g. 300 vs 500 yes, 350 vs 352 no.

Question 22

What is the subset-knower phase in number acquisition?

Answer 22

When infants know only 1 and >1, then 1, 2 and >2 and so on. They know only a subset of the numbers in their count list.

Question 23

How do kids learn to understand numerals based on count list?

Answer 23

Children learn that when a unit is added to a quantity they move to the next word in the memorised count list. Systematic structure in language can be the basis of an analogy for systematic conceptual structure.