Intro to Cognitive Science - Unit 3 Flashcards
What are the general ideas that enable the categorization of unique stimuli as related to one another?
Concepts (183)
What does the classical approach to categorization assume?
That the defining features on a concept are governed by a conjunctive rule stating that every feature must be present for an object to fit the concept: very stringent (184)
What is a “rule-governed concept?”
A concept that specifies the features and relations that define membership in the class on an all-or-none basis, like real numbers, gravity, touchdowns, etc. (184)
What kind of concepts does the classical approach to categorization assumes applies to all objects?
Rule-governed concepts (184)
What is an “object concept?”
Refers to natural objects (biological objects) and artifacts (man-made), often organized hierarchically: like robin, bird, animal (184)
What is the contrast between rule-governed and object concepts?
There’s no really defining set of characteristics to help you determine whether an object fits an object concept (184)
Can there ever be a fuzzy boundary between concept memberships?
Duh: varying images of cups/glasses/bowls/mugs…. Hunger vs thirst affected view of bowl vs cup (186)
What is a “prototype?”
The best or most typical member of a category: important mental representation of the concept; when shifting from it, there’s a gradient away from the prototype; “cover figure” (186)
What is the family resemblance structure of object concepts? Who coined this phrase?
When the definitions for a category are a large number of broader features that may not all apply in every case, instead of a smaller set of defining features (188)
How can one measure how close or far an object is to the category’s prototype?
By the speed at which they can identify that word as part of the category (188)
What is the typicality effect?
The gradient of category membership, or differences in how well specific instances represent a concept (188)
Can a concept be coherent even without structural/functional/perceptual similarities?
Yes: things to take out of the house in a fire, for example (188)
What did Barton and Komatsu discover about changing internal features or functional features for natural kinds or artifacts?
Changing the internal molecular structure of natural kinds of objects led to different categorization, and changing the functional structure of artifacts led to different categorization: for example, a tire isn’t made of rubber will still be categorized as a tire, but a tire that doesn’t roll will not be (189)
What two brain areas are activated when assigning words to concepts?
The VLPFC and the ventral/lateral regions of the posterior temporal cortex (189)
Why is there activation in the temporal lobe when assigning words/objects to categories/concepts?
Because the temporal lobe is the end of the “what” visual pathway: each area of the temporal lobe houses a particular concept: for example, the fusiform face gyrus (189)
Changes in number but not object identity are registered in the ___, but changes in object identity but not number are registered in the ___.
Intraparietal sulcus, fusiform gyrus in the temporal lobe (190)
What is a schema?
A cognitive structure that organizes related concepts and integrates past events (190)
What are “frames” in relation to schemas?
Schemas that represent the physical structure of the environment (190)
What is the essence of a frame? What does it do?
Gives a detailed structural description of the concepts and relations among concepts that define a given physical environment (191)
What are “scripts” in relation to schemas?
Schemas that represent routine activities (191)
What is a meta-representation?
A mental representation of another mental representation: allows you to think about another thought (191)
What is mindblindness? What is it a characteristic of?
Inability to understand that others have mental representations too: common feature of autism (192)
What is an imaginal code?
A concrete means of mental representation that directly conveys perceptual qualities: if perceived visually, then the mental image seems like the original perception (194)
What is a propositional code?
An abstract means of mental representation that’s not linked to any sensory modality: represents the features of an object without forming an image, like a bird word map (194)
Who pioneered the study of visual images by experimenting with mental rotation?
Shepard et al, 1974, 1983, 1971 (195)
Propositional code
An abstract means of mental representation not linked to any sensory modality (194)
What did Shepard et al discover about mental rotation?
That the time taken to identify that the rotated image matched the original increased linearly as a function of the angle of rotation, disqualifying the idea of propositional mental representations (197)
What did Kosslyn discover about scanning small mental images versus large ones?
It’s hard to scan to find features in small mental images (199)
What does it mean that mental imagery has an analog aspect?
That the representation’s features are analogous/correspond to the features of the object: for example, distance: if two cities are further apart on a map, it takes longer for the brain to mentally draw a straight line between then (199)
What is the functional equivalence hypothesis?
Claims that visual imagery uses the same mental representations, processes, and neural structures as does visual perception (199)
As found by Farah, 1988, lesions in visual areas affect not only sight, but what else?
Imagery, in accordance with the functional equivalence hypothesis (199)
What is a proposition?
An abstract representation that is the smallest unit of knowledge that one can judge to be true or false (202)
What is “latent semantic analysis?”
A mathematical procedure for extracting/representing the propositions expressed in the text: allows comparison in terms of propositional content and enables question-answering about the text (203)
What is a semantic network model?
The hierarchical structure by which one organizes concepts and their associated features (204)
What does the cognitive economy assumption claim?
That each feature of a concept is listed at only one level in the semantic network model: so you don’t need to store that a canary can sing and has skin, because skin is already listed under animal, which canary is a part of (204)
Which is faster, identity judgments or basic-level categorization?
Identity judgments: easier to say a canary is a canary than a canary is a bird (204)
When verifying that a subordinate object is part of basic or superordinate category, which takes longer?
Superordinate: higher up in the semantic network model’s hierarchy (204)
Which researchers studied the semantic network model of category retrieval, leading to WordNet?
Collins and Quillian, 1969 (204)
Do people represent a strict hierarchy of class relations? Who discovered the answer to this?
Rips, Shoben, and Smith (1973) : no, because “collie = mammal” takes longer than “collie = animal” when according to a strict hierarchy, animal is higher than mammal (@06)
What did Conrad notice was wrong with Collins’ and Quillian’s semantic network model of class retrieval?
It’s not completely accurate: retrieval depends on how strongly connected a feature is to the object (way faster than expected association between orange = edible) and there aren’t differences where there should be (time for bird = move is just as fast as animal = move) (207)
What model arose to combat the semantic network model?
The feature comparison model (207)
What is the feature comparison model?
The model that claims that characteristic/defining features are assessed and categorized first, and then more defining features are retrieved if necessary (207)
What two effects does the feature comparison model explain that the semantic network model does not?
Typicality effect (differences in how well specific instances relate to a concept) and the category size effect (faster identification if object relates to small group than larger) (207)
Which research is responsible for the category size effect?
D.E. Meyer, 1970 (207)
What is one of the drawbacks to the feature comparison model?
It doesn’t explain why false statements with similar concepts (all dogs = cats) take less processing time than “all animals = birds,” because dogs vs cats should take two levels or processing (defining+characteristic, then defining) whereas animals vs birds should only take one (defining+characteristic) (208)
What are the five assumptions of the classical approach to representation?
Representations are mediating states of intelligent systems that carry info; cognitive systems require some enduring representations; cognitive systems have symbols; some representations are tied to particular perceptual systems, some are amodal; many cognitive functions can be modeled without regard to the particular sensor/effector systems of the cognitive agent (451)
What does Barsalou’s perceptual symbol system approach propose?
The perceptual system is used to simulate objects and events in order to represent the external world: representing an apple in a bowl = simulating an apple on top of other apples using the perceptual system (451)
What does the perceptual approach suggest?
That there aren’t just amodal symbols: specific representations derived from perception provide greater flexibility (452)
What does the study of situated action assume?
That cognitive processing cannot be extracted from the environment in which it occurs (452)
What does change blindness say about situated cognition?
The agent can and does leave out certain information when storing representations: difficult to detect changes of unattended info (452)
What aspect of the classical model of representation does the embodied cognition model reject?
The idea that cognitive theories can ignore perceptual/motor systems: it’s necessary to build agents that actually interact in real environments (453)
What are dynamical systems?
Systems of nonlinear differential equations used to describe aspects of behavior: involve continuous change in values of control variables (WTF? 453)
What does the dynamical system approach suggest?
That representations are time-locked to info in the represented world: if the world changes, so does the representation (453)
What approach to categorization does Sloutsky propose?
The similarity-based approach: early on, humans use perceptual and attentional mechanisms to detect multiple similarities (246)
Why is categorization economical?
It’s easier to incorporate many individual entities into a smaller number of classes (246)
Why does Sloutsky believe categorization is important?
1) resource efficient; 2) supports organization of knowledge; 3) supports inductive projection (246)
What does Sloutsky mean by inductive generalization?
The combined ability of categorization and inductive projection (246)
What is the “classical” view of conceptual development?
That first, representations of categories develop arise from accidental features/appearance similarities, but they then evolve into mature representations based on logical rules (246)
What view of conceptual development has replaced the “classical” view?
Naïve-theory of knowledge-based (246)
What does the naïve-theory/knowledge-based position posit?
mature categorization cannot develop from simpler perceptual components because even for young children, “perceptual features… play a peripheral role in categorization” compared to conceptually central features, and other reasons (247)
What are some limitations to the naïve-theory or knowledge-based position of conceptual development?
No origin of conceptual knowledge explained, the explanatory concepts are themselves complex, and the assumptions on which it’s based are being disproved (247)
What is the central argument of the similarity-based approach?
That “there are multiple correlations in the environment and that humans have perceptual and attentional mechanisms capable of extracting these regularities and establishing correspondences among correlated structures” (247)
What did the Gelman and Markman triad experiment demonstrate?
linguistic labels relay conceptual information that is more central than perceptual similarity (247) because: pine-cone-looking “starfish” identified as living in water even though it looked more like a tree-dwelling pinecone
Why does it seem that labels gain their weight from an attentional mechanism?
Because peripheral features do in fact affect the centrality of essential features: there aren’t fixed roles of central vs peripheral, but rather flexible attentional weight (428)
Why is it believed that labels affect inductive generalization thanks to general auditory attentional bias rather than general language attentional bias?
In Sloutsky+Napolitano’s study, children were more likely to select the auditory match than the visual match (249)
What is perceptual learning?
a process by which some features or stimulus dimensions become more distinct as a result of experience, whereas others become more equivalent (249)
What does the evidence from infancy research paradigms suggest about experience with multiple exemplars?
That when presented with multiple exemplars, the perceptual system is directed towards “extracting important category-specific regularities,” ie that it becomes better at picking out the similarities in order to distinguish whether novel stimuli belong to a familiar category or not (249)
