Psych 100 - Cognition - Final exam Flashcards
Cognition
The process of acquiring and using knowledge
Cognitive psychology
The study of mental processes, and how they relate to our feelings and behaviour.
Category and concepts
Category - A set of objects that can be treated as equivalent in some way.
Concept - the mental representation we form of categories.
Nature of categories - necessary features
What objects must have in order to be in it for category membership.
Joint sufficient (category)
If an object has those features, then it is in that category.
Typicality in categories
Some members of categories are better members than others. Ie. robins and sparrows are typical members of the bird category.
Likely have an image of a smallish bird when someone says that there is a bird in their yard. Not an image of a hummingbird or a turkey.
Prototype
The most typical category member.
Items that are less and less similar to the prototype become less and less typical.
Changes in typicality usually lead to borderline members.
Family resemblance theory
Proposes that items are likely to be typical if they have the features that are frequent in the category, and do not have features frequent in other categories.
Eg. robins have the shape, size, body parts, and behaviours that are very common among most birds.
Heirarchies
Where more concrete categories are nested inside larger, abstract categories.
Eg. Desk chair, chair, furniture, artifact, and object.
Basic level of categorization
The preference to label objects with a single, consistent name instead of a more complicated category.
Eg. Move that chair, instead of move that desk chair, or piece of furniture.
Prototype theory
Suggests that people have a summary representation of the category.
A mental description that is meant to apply to the category as a whole.
Weighted features
Features are weighted by their frequency in the category.
For category of birds, having wings and feathers would have a very high weight. Living in the Antarctica would have a lower weight.
Exemplar theory
Theory claims that your concept of vegetables is remembered examples of vegetables you have seen. Could be hundreds or thousands of exemplars over the course of your life.
When you see an object, you unconsciously compare it to the exemplars in your memory and you judge how similar it is to exemplars in different categories.
Knowledge approach
Concepts are meant to tell us about real things in the world.
Our knowledge of the world is used in learning and thinking about concepts.
Can lead to errors - reliance on past knowledge can lead to errors.
Eg. when people don’t learn about features of their new tablet that weren’t present in their phone, or expect the phone to do something that it can’t based on the previous phone.
Schemas
A way to cognitively organize the knowledge that we have on specific things: people, activities, categories, events…
Cognitive, but interact with feelings and behaviour.
