General Knowledge (ch 9) Flashcards
Concepts
A mental representation of a class or individual. Also, the meaning of objects, events, and abstract ideas. An example of a concept would be the way a person mentally represents “cat” or “house.”
Categorization
The process by which objects are placed in categories.
Schemas
A person’s knowledge about what is involved in a particular experience.
Scripts
Similar to the script for a play, a mental script is a general knowledge structure about ordinary events and situations. Mental representation of “what’s supposed to happen” or in a particular order.
Heuristics
A person’s knowledge about what is involved in a particular experience, often the “rule of thumb.”
Semantic Network Model
An approach to understanding how concepts are organized in the mind that proposes that concepts are arranged in networks. Ideas branch out, creating a web of relationships between ideas.
Nodes
typically represent a single concept or feature, are connected to other nodes
Activation
the arousal level of a node
Spreading Activation
When a node is activated, activity spreads out along all connected links. Concepts that receive activation are “primed” and more easily accessed from memory.
Cognitive Economy
Shared properties are only stored at higher-level nodes.
Exceptions
stored at lower nodes.
Lexical Decision Tasks
Participants read stimuli and are asked to say as quickly as possible whether the item is a word or not.
Prototype Model
Our mental categories are represented in terms of a concept, with typical members being stored close to the prototype and peripheral members stored farther away. A prototype is the most typical or representative example of a category.
Eleanor Rosch (1973)
argued that “artificial categories” have little relationship to the “natural categories” we use in language and thought.
Typicality Effect
Prototypical objects are processed preferentially.
