L16 - Conceptual Development, Conceptual Hierarchies and Contrast Categories Flashcards
Which is the examplar model
GCM or MPM
GCM
The more dimensions that participants need to learn for categories the
longer it takes them to learn and they make more errors
Describe the method of the Ameel, Malt & Storms (2008) real world category learning experiment
What were the findings of the Ameel, Malt & Storms (2008) real world category learning experiment?
- When children are younger, their categories are very broad and used only a limited set of words - (most were said to be “bowls”)
- As they got older, new words added to their vocabulary
- As words are added, their categories get restructured
How does our ability to categorize change as we get older?
We become more specific with our categories
The closer in ___ people are, the more similar their naming patterns are
Age
Children tend to __________ their words, but this narrows over time
Over-extends
e.g. everything is called a bottle at the start, and this gets more defined over time
Categories are culture, person and time-specific
True or False
True
things we call a bottle might not be a bottle in another culture
is there 1-1 overlaps with category representations in different cultures?
No, categories are different among cultures
Are categories stable across time?
No
Categories are dynamic and constantly changing
Within categories, under-extended words _____ over time
Broaden
What type of structure do real-world categories have?
Hierarchical Structure
Tree of life
Our conceptual representeations follow what type of structure?
Hierarchical Structure
Ranges from more abstract to more concrete
In a hierarchical concept structure, a animal is a more 1)_____ representation and a sausage dog is a more 2______ representation
1) abstract
2) concrete
What are the three levels of the hierarchical concept structure?
Super-ordinate
Basic
Sub-ordinate
Items located at the same level of abstraction in the hierarchical concept structure are called?
ordinates
Which level of hierarchy do people typically give when being asked a question?
Why?
Basic level
It is most useful, as it contains the best balance between informativeness and distinctiveness
What is the downside of using a high level of abstraction in the super-ordinate categories
They lack informativeness
What are the pros and cons of using a sub-ordinate category level?
Sub-ordinate categories are highly informative, but lack distinctiveness
They are too specific
What is the most useful category level to use in the hierarchical concept structure?
Basic Category
Most people use the basic level when they are naming items, however, what did Tanaka and Taylor (1991) show that this is dependent on?
Expertise
Experts more likely to give names at the sub-ordinate level
For using the correct name, efficient thinking requires choosing the right level of ______
abstraction
e.g. we are more likely to say ‘Look at that rabid dog’
than ‘Look at that rabid sausage dog’, or ‘Look at
that rabid animal’. Note: all three statements make sense
– other times it makes sense to be more abstract. We say: ‘Today I went to the zoo and saw lots of
different animals’, rather than listing all the
different animals you saw
How does storying categories within a hierarchical organisation optimize cognitive economy
The features of the category apply to its members, so we don’t need to remember the individual members features if we remember the superordinate category.
Because a cat is a mammal we can infer it <has> and <lactates>. We don’t need to explicitly associate these features with cat.</lactates></has>
Rosch & Mervis (1975) argued that graded category strucutre isn’t just based on inter-item similarity of the category members, but it should also be influenced by ________
contrast categories
What are contrast categories?
categories that exist within the same domain, and at the same level of abstraction but are different
e.g. birds and mammals are contrast categories within the domain animals
A bat is considered an “a-typical mammal”, why?
If has low relative similarity to other mammals
but has high relative similarity to contrast categories (e.g wings so similar to birds)
What did Verbeemen et al (2001) find when he investigated Rosch and Mervis’s prediction that categories should be based on contrast categories as well?
Contrast-category predictions did not find correlations
Did not find the contrast-category effect
What did Dry and Storms (2011) we argue that the failure for Verbeemen (2001) to find contrast category effects?
the models only accounted for common features and did not take distinctive feature information of category domains into account.
wings are more distinctive of a bird, whereas we can assume all animals share features relating to “animal-ness”
How did Dry and Storms (2011) test for distinctivness?
They generalized the family
resemblance and polymorphous concept models to
take both common and distinctive feature information
into account.
What did Dry and Storms (2011) find regarding what typicality features are based on when comparing memebers of a category to other members of its category?
The degree to which it shares features in common seems to affect the typicality rating
What did Dry and Storms (2011) find regarding what typicality features are based on when comparing contrast categories?
The optimal correlations was when there were a mixture of common and distinctive information
What did Dry and Storms (2011) find in regards to contrast category effects?
Contrast category effects exist
What do we use common features and distinctive features for when categorizing?
Common features tend to pull categories together
Distinctive features tend to help delineate the borders of categories.
Typical exemplars within one category would appear to have more features that are ______ to their respective category , and fewer features that are____ to the contrast category
same word
distinctive
Summary:
• Real-world category stricture is complex and
conceptual representations develop slowly
over time
• It appears that our conceptual representations
are hierarchically structured
• Categories located at the same level of
abstraction within these hierarchies influence
each others structure (contrast category
effects).
Good luck!
