Graded structure

Question 1

Graded structure

Answer 1

The idea that people see some members of a category as a better/more typical examples of the category than others

Question 2

Categorisation and graded structure

Answer 2

Category members vary on a continuum regarding how good/typical they are as examples of their category

Question 3

Rosch 1975 showed

Answer 3

Being asked how good/typical something is of its category turns out to be a meaningful thing to ask. people overwhelmingly agree about these sorts of ranking

Question 4

According to Barsalou 1987

Answer 4

Because every category observed so far has been found to have graded structure, it appears that graded structure is a universal property of categories

Question 5

Family resemblance

Answer 5

members share lots of features, e.g., beard, hair colour, nose size etc. But no one member has all the common features

Question 6

Prototype

Answer 6

An abstract composite of the shared features. Strong advocates of the prototype approach believe -
- categorisation is all about abstracting common features from examples-prototypes

Question 7

Prototype vs. exemplar

Answer 7

• some disagree its about abstracting common features
• instead, simply match new example to existing ‘exemplars’ in the category
• categorisation = comparison to real member examples

Question 8

Central tendency

Answer 8

The prototype approach is all about ‘central tendency’

- you compare how near this new idea is to the existing ones