Lecture 3 - Categories and Concepts Flashcards
Theory of categories - Exemplar
told things are similar and belong to a category so they become what you compare new things to
Theory of Categories - Prototype
Storing an average of a category to compare anything new to
Category learning in Pigeons - learning trees
Thousands of pictures in training
Successful discrimination of novel images
Also learn a specific person
tropical fish - no perdisposition
Category learning in pigeons - multiple categories
4 categories learnt and applied to novel images
Larger sets produce poorer learning for the training items and better performance for the test items
Larger the set = better acquisition of categories
Categories with Capuchins
Successful discrimination of people and non people
Some errors
Later found that all human images had red in them so they were categorising using that instead
Categorisation determined by features
Artificial faces shown to pigeons
Found that responding to the faces was an orderly consequence of the feature sum
Pecked most when the feature sum was high and less when the feature sum was low
what are concrete categories
Visible information that can tell the animals which category it belongs to even if they are slightly different
Simple associative learning can explain acquisition of concrete categories
What are abstract categories
based on relationships
evidence that non-human animals can learn relational categories is mixed
People are able to learn abstract categories
Concrete/abstract categories with children
Younger children choose concrete categories based on shape that matches
As they get older/adults choose the abstract category
We are taught to use abstract categories but it can overcomplicate it
If non-human animals use perceptual features to categories then will they struggle to learn relational categories
Lecture tasks
Pearce 1988 – pigeons can learn this task when average height of bars is low or high
Cross-species comparisons are difficult, but they seem to learn more readily than humans
We are taught to look for patterns and relationships so we struggle
Pearce 1988 – pigeons have greater difficulty if the task is to spot same sized bars
They remember individual patterns rather than the rule
sameness/difference learning in pigeons
Pigeons rewarded for pecking at the flanker that matched the sample image
Group 2-samples: Two sample pictures, fast learning
Only a combination of 4 trials so they might just be remembering the correct response
Novel pictures provided no evidence for the same/different rule
Larger sample were able to learn the rule
sameness/difference - matching to sample
Pigeons find this task very difficult, but other species are able to master it more easily
Not impossible for birds – Alex the parrot
Perhaps pigeons can perceive sameness, but it lacks salience (Wilson, 1985)
The Abstract rule of opposites
One reaction for the individual and the other response for the compound stimulus
Could learn the compound rule or could just learn each one
Train them with the incomplete sets then test with the complete sets
Second order relationships in chimps
When required to choose the matching pair for food they failed
When choosing which to play with they chose the non matching pairs
Animals usually prefer novelty – just allowed them to play with the pair that was different
Usually found that they would then choose to play with the pair that is the same because the internal relationship is novel to them
