Knowledge and how it is represented in the brain

Question 1

What is a concept

Answer 1

Concept is a mental representation of categories. Concepts are the possible relations between entities.

Question 2

Are concepts Hierarchical) networks of concepts in semantic memory?

Answer 2

yes

Question 3

What is a prototype?

Answer 3

abstracted from experinced instances. average members

Question 4

Why do we have concepts?

Answer 4

enable us to generalise from past experience of instances to predict properties, behaviour, etc of new instance.

Question 5

Why categroise?

Answer 5

categorisation predicts and conceptual hierarchies provide economy of representation in memory

Question 6

Which information should take longer to retrieve

Answer 6

properties stored higher up should take longer to retrieve. (e.g. can canary’s sing)

Question 7

Example of reaction time for higher up concepts

Answer 7

Reaction Time for “a dog is an animal” < “a dog is a mammal”

Question 8

• Reaction Time for category decision depends on rated typicality of instance:

example

Answer 8

“chicken is a bird” > “sparrow is a bird”

Question 9

Are all members of a category equally good members?

Answer 9

no

Question 10

What is multi-dimenstional scaling

Answer 10

finds the “space” that best captures similarity ratings

Question 11

What is connectionist?

Answer 11

(“parallel distributed processing” [PDP] or “neural network”)