Lecture 10. Concepts and Categories Flashcards
What is one advantage of categoritsation?
Hint: stating easy here
Hint 2: The ability to form equivalence _____ of discriminable _______
The ability to form equivalence classes of descriminable entities
How can categories advantage us? What can they offer if we travel to a new city for example?
The automatic triggering of familiar categories is what helps us make sense of the incoming information. Without any effort, we find ourselves thinking “funny looking guy”, “pretty girl”, “stupid commercial”, “dumb politicians”, “what’s she reading?”, “who’s whistling?”, “will that child never stop crying?”, “where did that cat come from?”
These sensations and thoughts are defined and interpreted by the concepts we hold. The concepts that form the cornerstone of our thought processes are subtle and complex
If at ever moment we are faced with an indefinite number of overlapping and intermingling situations that forming categories can immediately help us with, then understanding the world must involve the automatic and effortless what?
Understanding the world involves involves the automatic and effortless evocation of categories
What are some benefits of forming categories? The in class examples for this were -
- The indiscriminate image, that we managed to categorise into a flying bird, what benefit did this provide?
- the multitudes of shades of colours, and categorising them into “pink”, “purple” etc
- More closely associating similar looking birds
- identification
- Reduce the complexity of lots of stimuli to only a few categories
- ability to generalise
What is categorisation induction?
Generalising from the particular to the general
i.e. given a set of examples, what is the general conclusion that one could draw?
What is an example of a typical premise category induction?
Hint: think of the semantic network here. What is easier to form a general premise of the characteristic from? a typical member of the group or an odd member of the group?
by giving an example where we refer to a robin as a type of bird, we are more likely to be able for a generalisation about birds than if we were talking about penguins, for example, because a robin is a typical member of the bird family
Typical instances are more strongly related to the category and so allow for greater generalisations
in category inductions, what is an example of a typical conclusion example?
Hint: generalisation is greater to more typical category members than less to members that are different
Hint hint: again we can refer to the semantic network here as we generally want to keep the semantic network tight….
For example, if we use robins and bluejays in an example, it is easier for us to extent that example to sparrows as opposed to a more different type of bird, like a goose or an ostrich etc
What about category induction on category size?
Hint: going up levels of the semantic network!
referring to a sparrow and a bluejay, we can more easily generalise to birds than to animals
We more easily broaden our generalisation out to a tighter semantic networks than a broader one
Variability in semantic networks - what can the effect of hearing about a wider variety of items do for generalisation?
Hint: semantic network once again!
Hearing about the same trait in rhinos and mice allow us to generalise out to all mammals
hearing about more closely associated animals, like rhinos and hippos, make us keep tighter in the semantic network
Hearing about a wider variety of animals allows us to generalise out wider
What is a way to tell if an infant has become habitualised to an shape or object?
They will stop looking at it and prefer to look at the novel object
What did Eimas and Quinn find (1994) find?
Babies looked at the different/new species of animal than to a horse after being shown a group of horses
so, we can categorise in terms of abstract concepts right?
Right!
How do we know that selective attention is important?
Hint: do we have limited capacity stores? are more dimensions easier or harder to learn?
Selective attention is important so that we can choose what to attend to and appreciate its importance
So, Shepard, Hovland and Jenkins showed that category learned depended on what?
hint: this experiment involved another shepard with figures!
The more dimensions in the category the more difficult it became to learn the category
Does selective attention have limited capacity?
Yes it does
