Knowledge Flashcards
What is a concept?
A concept is a mental representation that is used for a variety of cognitive functions, including memory, reasoning, and using and understanding language (Solomon et al., 1999).
You think of a cat. Use the idea of concepts to explain what is happening.
When you think about cats, you are drawing on your concept, or mental representation, of cats, which includes information about what cats are, what they usually look like, how they behave, and so on.
Concepts are interesting to cognitive scientists. What type of concepts are most thoroughly studied in cognitive psychology?
Categorization, which is the process by which things are placed into groups called categories.
What is one of the most important functions of categories?
That they help us to understand individual cases we have never seen before. For example, being able to say that the furry animal across the street is a “cat” provides a great deal of information about it.
Categories have sometimes been called …
“pointers to knowledge” (Yamauchi & Markman, 2000). Once you know something is in a category, you know a lot of general things about it.
How have cognitive psychologists thought about how objects are placed into categories?
- We use a definitional approach.
- We use a protoype approach.
- We use an exemplar approach.
What is a prototype approach to object categorisation?
According to the prototype approach to categorisation, membership in a category is determined by comparing the object to a prototype that represents the category.
What is a exemplar approach to object categorisation, and how does it relate to the prototype approach?
The exemplar approach to categorisation, like the prototype approach, involves determining whether an object is similar to a standard object. However, whereas the standard for the prototype approach is a single “average” member of the category, the standard for the exemplar approach involves many examples, each one called an exemplar.
What is a definitional approach to object categorisation?
According to the definitional approach to categorisation, we can decide whether something is a member of a category by determining whether a particular object meets the definitions of the category.
There is a problem with the definition approach to categorisation. What?
Definitions are usually too narrow or not narrow enough to account for the intuitive categorisation people do.
So.. What is a “typical” member of a particular category?
Elinor Rosch (1973) proposed that the “typical” prototype is based on an average of members of a category that are commonly experienced.
Researchers have looked at how typical a member of a particular category is. What predicts how typical an item is for a category?
Rosch and Mervis (1975) had participants write down common characteristics and attributes for different objects of the same category (e.g. furniture). Those that had a lot of similar attributes/characteristics were more likely to be regarded as typical for that group.
What are the research findings we have from research on prototypes?
- Prototypical objects have high family resemblance.
- Statements about prototypical objects are verified rapidly.
- Prototypical objects are named first.
- Prototypical objects are affected more by priming.
Statements about prototypical objects are verified rapidly. Huh?
Edward Smith and coworkers (1974) used a procedure called the sentence verification technique to determine how rapidly people could answer questions about an object’s category (e.g. “An apple is a fruit” - yes/no).
Participants reponded faster for objects that are high in prototypicality than they did for objects that are low in prototypicality.
Prototypical objects are named first. Huh?
When participants are asked to list as many objects in a category as possible, they tend to list the most prototypical members of the category first.
How are prototypical objects affected more by priming?
Rosch, 1975b gave participants a primed color (e.g. “green”), then would show them slides of either a prototypical green or a less prototypical green, or a different color entirely. They were told to indicate whether the primed color was same to the color on the slide. Reponse time was faster on prototypical colors.
What approach works better: prototype or exemplars?
Based on the results of a number of research studies, some researchers have concluded that people may use both approaches. It has been proposed that as we initially learn about a category, we may average exemplars into a prototype; then, later in learning, some of the exemplar information becomes stronger. Thus, early in learning we would be poor at taking into account “exceptions”, such as ostriches or penguins (birds), but later, exemplars for these cases would be added to the category.
