Knowledge Flashcards
Define conceptual knowledge.
Knowledge that enables us to recognise objects and events and to make inferences about their properties.
What does conceptual knowledge include?
Concepts.
What are concepts?
The mental representation of a class or individual, and the meaning of objects, events and abstract ideas.
What is a category?
A structure that include all possible examples of a concept (ie. the category ‘cats’ includes breeds of cats).
Define categorisation.
The process by which things are placed in categories.
Give another name for categories.
Pointers to knowledge.
Being able to place things in categories can help us to understand what?
Behaviours that we would otherwise find confusing, like people dressing as monsters, which is acceptable on Halloween.
According to the definitional approach to categorisation, how do we decide whether something is part of a category?
By determining whether the object meets the definition of the category.
What do definitions work for, and what do they not?
Geometric shapes, but not for most natural objects and human-made objects.
Who proposed the idea of family resemblance to deal with the problem that definitions do not include all members of a category?
Wittgenstein.
What does family resemblance mean (with reference to categories)?
The idea that things in a particular category resemble one another in a number of ways.
What does the family resemblance approach allow for?
Variation within categories.
What has family resemblance lead psychologists to propose about categorisation?
It is based on determining how similar an object is to some standard representation of a category.
How are objects placed in categorised 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 prototype?
A typical member of the category.
What did Rosch propose about the typical prototype?
It is based on an average of members of a category that are commonly experienced.
Describe the typical prototype of the prototype approach to categorisation?
The prototype is not an actual member of the category, but an average representation of the category.
How does Rosch describe variations within categories?
Representing differences in typicality.
What does high typicality mean?
A category member closely resembles the prototype.
How did Rosch and Mervis find that there is a strong relationship between family resemblance and prototypicality?
Similar objects, like chairs and sofas, that are both consumed under the category ‘furniture’ have high family similarity and high prototypicality.
What is sentence verification technique?
A procedure to determine how rapidly people answer questions about an object’s category.
Who developed sentence verification technique?
Smith.
What is the typicality effect?
The ability to judge highly prototypical objects more rapidly.
Give three aspects of prototypical objects, relating to the typicality effect.
People can judge them faster, they are generally named first when listing items from a category, and they are affected more by priming.
When does priming occur?
When presentation of one stimulus facilitates the response to another stimulus that usually follows closely in time.
Who demonstrated that prototypical members of a category are more affected by a priming stimulus than nonprototypical members?
Rosch.
Give the four effects of prototypicality.
Family resemblance typicality, naming and priming.
How is the exemplar approach similar to the prototype approach?
It also recognises the wide variation among items that belong to a particular category.
What does the exemplar approach to categorisation involve?
Determining whether an object is similar to other objects.
How is the exemplar approach different to the prototype approach?
The standard for the prototype approach is a single average member of the category, while the standard for the exemplar approach involves many examples.
What is an exemplar?
Actual members of the category that a person has encountered in the past.
How does the exemplar approach explain the typicality effect?
By proposing that objects that are like more of the exemplars are classified faster.
What is hierarchical organisation?
A kind of organisation where larger, more general categories are divided into smaller, more specific categories.
Give Rosch’s three levels of categories.
Superordinate/global, basic, and subordinate/specific.
Why did Rosch believe that the basic level of categorisation is psychologically special?
Because going above it results in a large loss of information, and going below results in little gain of information.
In order to fully understand how people categorise objects, we need to consider what?
The properties of the objects and the learning and experience of the people perceiving those objects.
What does the semantic network approach propose?
Concepts are arranged in networks.
What was the first semantic network models based on the work of, and what where they investigating?
Quilian, who wanted to develop a computer model of human memory.
