L16 - Conceptual Development, Conceptual Hierarchies and Contrast Categories

Question 1

Which is the examplar model

GCM or MPM

Answer 1

GCM

Question 2

The more dimensions that participants need to learn for categories the

Answer 2

longer it takes them to learn and they make more errors

Question 3

Describe the method of the Ameel, Malt & Storms (2008) real world category learning experiment

Answer 3

Question 4

What were the findings of the Ameel, Malt & Storms (2008) real world category learning experiment?

Answer 4

• 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

Question 5

How does our ability to categorize change as we get older?

Answer 5

We become more specific with our categories

Question 6

The closer in ___ people are, the more similar their naming patterns are

Answer 6

Age

Question 7

Children tend to __________ their words, but this narrows over time

Answer 7

Over-extends

e.g. everything is called a bottle at the start, and this gets more defined over time

Question 8

Categories are culture, person and time-specific

True or False

Answer 8

True

things we call a bottle might not be a bottle in another culture

Question 9

is there 1-1 overlaps with category representations in different cultures?

Answer 9

No, categories are different among cultures

Question 10

Are categories stable across time?

Answer 10

No

Categories are dynamic and constantly changing

Question 11

Within categories, under-extended words _____ over time

Answer 11

Broaden

Question 12

What type of structure do real-world categories have?

Answer 12

Hierarchical Structure

Tree of life

Question 13

Our conceptual representeations follow what type of structure?

Answer 13

Hierarchical Structure

Ranges from more abstract to more concrete

Question 14

In a hierarchical concept structure, a animal is a more 1)_____ representation and a sausage dog is a more 2______ representation

Answer 14

1) abstract
2) concrete

Question 15

What are the three levels of the hierarchical concept structure?

Answer 15

Super-ordinate

Basic

Sub-ordinate

Question 16

Items located at the same level of abstraction in the hierarchical concept structure are called?

Answer 16

ordinates

Question 17

Which level of hierarchy do people typically give when being asked a question?

Why?

Answer 17

Basic level

It is most useful, as it contains the best balance between informativeness and distinctiveness

Question 18

What is the downside of using a high level of abstraction in the super-ordinate categories

Answer 18

They lack informativeness

Question 19

What are the pros and cons of using a sub-ordinate category level?

Answer 19

Sub-ordinate categories are highly informative, but lack distinctiveness

They are too specific

Question 20

What is the most useful category level to use in the hierarchical concept structure?

Answer 20

Basic Category

Question 21

Most people use the basic level when they are naming items, however, what did Tanaka and Taylor (1991) show that this is dependent on?

Answer 21

Expertise

Experts more likely to give names at the sub-ordinate level

Question 22

For using the correct name, efficient thinking requires choosing the right level of ______

Answer 22

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

Question 23

How does storying categories within a hierarchical organisation optimize cognitive economy

Answer 23

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>

Question 24

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 ________

Answer 24

contrast categories

Question 25

What are contrast categories?

Answer 25

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

Question 26

A bat is considered an “a-typical mammal”, why?

Answer 26

If has low relative similarity to other mammals

but has high relative similarity to contrast categories (e.g wings so similar to birds)

Question 27

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?

Answer 27

Contrast-category predictions did not find correlations

Did not find the contrast-category effect

Question 28

What did Dry and Storms (2011) we argue that the failure for Verbeemen (2001) to find contrast category effects?

Answer 28

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”

Question 29

How did Dry and Storms (2011) test for distinctivness?

Answer 29

They generalized the family
resemblance and polymorphous concept models to
take both common and distinctive feature information
into account.

Question 30

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?

Answer 30

The degree to which it shares features in common seems to affect the typicality rating

Question 31

What did Dry and Storms (2011) find regarding what typicality features are based on when comparing contrast categories?

Answer 31

The optimal correlations was when there were a mixture of common and distinctive information

Question 32

What did Dry and Storms (2011) find in regards to contrast category effects?

Answer 32

Contrast category effects exist

Question 33

What do we use common features and distinctive features for when categorizing?

Answer 33

Common features tend to pull categories together

Distinctive features tend to help delineate the borders of categories.

Question 34

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

Answer 34

distinctive

Question 35

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).

Answer 35

Good luck!