Lecture 7

Question 1

Why do we have conceptual hubs? (2)

Answer 1

1. provide efficient way of integrating our knowledge on any concept
2. make it easier to detect semantic similarities across concepts, differing greatly in their modality-specific attributes (e.g. scallops and prawns look different, but are similar conceptually)

Question 2

What are categories?

Answer 2

A class of stimuli that are treated in an equivalent manner

Question 3

What are natural categories?

Answer 3

Categories that occur in natural language (fruit, animal, tool, furniture, clothing)

Question 4

What is the difference between artificial categories and natural categories?

Answer 4

Unlike artificial categories, features of natural category members are not combined arbitrarily

Question 5

Provide an overview of Bruner, Goodnow & Austin’s (1956) category learning study

Answer 5

required the learner to compare and contrast categories that contain concept-relevant features with categories that do not contain concept-relevant features

Question 6

What type of structure do natural categories have?

Answer 6

A correlational structure: some features go together e.g. “have feathers” + “have beaks” go together but “have petals” doesn’t

Question 7

What are three characteristics of natural categories?

Answer 7

1. fuzzy sets
2. family resemblance
3. internal structure

Question 8

What are fuzzy sets?

Answer 8

Boundaries of natural categories are ill-defined

Question 9

What is the study that correlates with fuzzy sets?

Answer 9

McCloksey & Glucksberg (1978): asked Ss to decide category mebership for each category pair (e.g. chair-furniture, cucumber-furniture) twice. Found that for intermediate exemplars (bookend-furniture) both subject agreement and consistency was low

Question 10

What is the idea of family resemblance?

Answer 10

No single attribute is shared by all members of a category but each member has at least one attribute shared with another member

Question 11

What is the study that correlates with family resemblance?

Answer 11

Wittgenstein (1953): “game” example

Question 12

What did Rosch & Mervis’ (1975) study on typicality show?

Answer 12

Ss rated how good a member of the category was e.g. fruit (1-7 scale) - typicality is not uniform

Question 13

What is the family resemblance score?

Answer 13

sum of the weighted scores of attributes e.g. swallow, robin & penguin

Question 14

What represents the prototype in a family resemblance score?

Answer 14

member of a category having the highest family resemblance scores represents the prototype

Question 15

What does internal structure mean?

Answer 15

more highly typical items are those that share more attributes in common with other examples

Question 16

In a natural category, what is a category centred around?

Answer 16

A prototype

Question 17

What are basic level categories?

Answer 17

most inclusive level which there are attributes common to many members of the category, and a few attributes that occur in other categories

Question 18

What categories are first learned by children?

Answer 18

basic-level categories - more likely to learn ‘chair’ first before ‘furniture’

Question 19

What are two ways that people categorise?

Answer 19

1. similarity-based views

2. Theory (knowledge) based view

Question 20

What is the prototype view?

Answer 20

People abstract the commonalities among the exemplars and the abstracted prototype is stored in memory - a new instance is compared to the prototype

Question 21

What is the exemplar view?

Answer 21

Unlikely to have a stored prototype for e.g. “people in my neighbourhood”, instead compare to individual instances/examples

Question 22

Describe the theory (knowledge) based view

Answer 22

suggests that categorisation is based on a theory (explanation) developed from instances

Question 23

What is the study that correlates with the theory (knowledge) based view?

Answer 23

Rips (1989): pizza vs. 20 cent coin: more likely to choose pizza because theory (explanation), pizzas vary in size, 20 cent coins do not

Question 24

What is the theory (knowledge) based view most likely to be affected by?

Answer 24

context - e.g. hair vs. cloud