What are categories?
when you group things together
What are concepts?
your knowledge about the group
What is the function of concepts?
- do the right thing with the right kind of thing
- how to act in new situations
- used to predict outcomes, guide behaviour, new outcomes
What are the two dimensions in which concepts are organized?
- Inclusivity (how specific something is)
- Top-down hierarchy
- Superordinate: most general way of talking about something
- Basic: how we talk about things normally
- subordinate: represent something with the lowest degree of inclusion/most specificity
What is cognitive economy?
A balance between simplification and differentiation. when categorizing and describing concepts
What level of concept organization is used by people with semantic dementia?
basic level, but as disease gets worst it is impaired.
What is graded organization?
we have good and bad examples of certain categories. ex: trout is better example of fish than shark
What is rule-based approach?
Concepts are defined as collections of sufficient and necessary features
What is the probability -based (prototype) approach?
concepts are formed through experience and based on probability
What is Bruner’s rule-based approach?
Concepts emerge from forming rules about attributes that define membership
what are attributes?
features that are expressed as different values by category members.
How do we establish a concept?
- by forming hypothesis about the different attributes that form a concept
- refining these hypotheses with test results
What are the 3 types of concepts?
- conjuctive concept: when an instance must hold all the attributes to make it a member
- disjunctive concept: when an instance must hold only one attribute to make it a member
- relation concept: when an instance must have attributes relate to make it a member
What is conservative focusing?
when you encounter a positive instance, and focus on just one attribute to create a rule and test that rule on new instances.
what is focus gambling?
when you encounter a positive instance, you focus on all the attributes of the instance to create a rule and test that rule on new instances.
Do concepts have rules?
Concepts do not have rules, rather are defined by a single essence or resemblance to a collection of features.
What is an item’s membership to a category like?
it is not all or none but a matter of degree. An item can belong to multiple categories at the same time.
What is prototype theory?
categories are formed from the overlap of concepts exemplars extracted from experience.
What is the typicality effect?
natural preference for processing prototypical than obscure members when accessing concept information.
what is an Ad-hoc category?
a category concept that is invented for a specific purpose or goal by bringing together dissimilar members
What do ad-hoc categories suggest about concepts?
that they are organized as knowledge not similarity
How is conceptual knowledge stored?
as sensorimotor representations in the brain
What is the perceptual symbols system?
Follows idea that we access different features of a concept depending on ourgoal or reason for accessing the information
What does the. perceptual symbols system reject?
the notion that concepts are abstract representations.
