Week 7 - Conceptual knowledge Flashcards
conceptual knowledge
knowledge that enables us to recognize objects and events and to make inferences about their properties
Category
includes all possible examples of a particular concept.
definitional approach to categorization
States that we can decide whether some-thing is a member of a category by determining whether a particular object meets the definition of the category.
Family resemblance
refers to the idea that things in a particular category resemble one another in a number of ways.
prototype approach to categorization
membership in a category is determined by comparing the object to a prototype that represents the category.
prototype df
a “typical” member of the category.
Typicality
High typicality means that a category member closely resembles the category prototype
sentence verification technique
A technique used to determine how rapidly people could answer questions about an object’s category
e.g.
Participants are presented with statements and are asked to answer “yes” if they think the statement is true and “no” if they think it isn’t.
“An apple is a fruit. or “A pomegranate is a fruit.
Typicality effect
This ability to judge highly prototypical objects more rapidly
Priming in relation to prototypical members?
prototypical members of a category are more affected by a priming stimulus than are nonprototypical members
Exemplars
actual members of the category that a person has encountered in the past. Thus, if a person has encountered sparrows, robins, and blue jays in the past, each of these would be an exemplar for the category “birds.”
The Exemplar Approach to Categorization
like the prototype approach, involves determining whether an object is similar to other objects.
However, whereas the standard for the prototype approach is a single “average” member of the category, the standard for the exemplar approach involves many examples, each one called an exemplar
hierarchical organization (e.g. of chairs)
e.g. the category “chairs” can contain smaller categories such as kitchen chairs and dining room chairs.
Category levels (3)
(1) the superordinate level, which we will call the global level (for example, “furniture”);
(2) the basic level (for example, “table”); and
(3) the subordinate level, which we will call the specific level (for example, “kitchen table”).
semantic network approach
Takes a similar 3 tier-category approach as heirarchical organisation.
Concepts are nodes, which have property offshoots. They can also offshoot to a higher tier concept (e.g. canary to bird) or to a lower one (‘living’ to ‘bird’).
