Concepts and Categorisation

Question 1

how are the transition in paintings characterised ?

Answer 1

pre renaissance: representational

post renaissance: photorealistic

Question 2

how is categorisation necessary for survival?

what are the two categories that we judge on?

Answer 2

• provides basis of deciding what constitutes appropriate action
• friendly v unfriendly… competent v incompetent they are

Question 3

what are the benefits of categories?

Answer 3

• provides means for identification (eg, identification of the A letter in different fonts)
• reduces complexity of the environment (eg, simplifying colours)
• allows for generalisation - don’t have be taught novel objects (generalisation of which types of birds Dan would like)

Question 4

what is induction in regards to categorisation?

Answer 4

generalising from the particular to the general… “given a set of examples, what is the general conclusion that one could draw?”

Question 5

what are the 5 key empirical effects that help us understand generalisation?

Answer 5

• categorisation and generalisation
• typicality of instances
• typicality of generalisations
• category size
• category variability

Question 6

how does a category induction task work?

Answer 6

shown a sentence eg all horses have tricket’s disease, you then have to identify if the generalisation of all mammals have trickets disease is accurate

Question 7

how does the effect of typical premise work?

Answer 7

people are more likely to generalise from a prototypical example of the category than from a less prototypical example
eg, more likely to generalise from robin to birds than penguins to birds

Question 8

what are the 3 main effects of typical conclusion?

Answer 8

1. typical instances are more strongly related to the category and so allow for greater generalisation to the broader category
2. generalisation is greater to more typical category members
3. generalisation is greater to more specific categories (I.E. smaller categories)
4. generalisation is greater when the examples are more variable (eg rhino and hippos instead of hippos and hamsters)

Question 9

what is generalisation affected by?

Answer 9

• typicality of instances
• typicality of category
• typicality of category size
• category variability

Question 10

how do we measure if infants can categorise?

Answer 10

habituation tests… show them stimuli where something (star) remains the same as a novel stimuli (lighting, sun, love heart) and track where they look to see what interests them, theory is that if they are interested, they are noticing if something is changing

Question 11

what is the main difference between infants and adults ability to categorise?

Answer 11

flexibility of concepts eg, kids categories are focused on perceptual grouping whereas adults can create categories on abstract things like unobservable attribute (love, doubt), relational concepts (enemy/barrier) and rules (what makes an uncle, island etc.)

Question 12

what is selective attention?

Answer 12

the factor which determines the influence or weight of a stimulus dimension or attribute on categorisation

Question 13

how do we know selective attention is important?

Answer 13

categories which require you to pay attention to more dimensions are harder to learn

Question 14

what does category learning difficulty depend on?

Answer 14

how many different dimensions are used to define the category

Question 15

T or false, children are more likely to sort stimuli on the basis of a single individual dimension of those stimuli than adults?

Answer 15

False, adults are sort stimuli on the basis of a single individual dimension of the stimuli

Question 16

what study showed that adults sort stimuli on a single dimension while children do not as much?

Answer 16

asking the kids and people to categorise the 3 different balls either based on just size (the rule) done by adults, or size and colour (used more by younger children)

Question 17

what is the overall finding of selective attention differing between adults and children?

Answer 17

utilising selective attention to simplify the world is a skill that takes time to develop as children tend to sort on the basis of overall similarity across all dimensions

Question 18

what is the causal theory of categorisation?

Answer 18

argued that when you are learning a category you are trying to figure out an explanation as to why the item belongs to the category

Question 19

what is the propose main benefit of causal theory of categorisation?

Answer 19

that knowing the cause that underlies the category provides an additional “deeper” dimension or feature that can be used to understand the category

Question 20

defining the relevant features which separate the categories allows for what ?

Answer 20

the development of theories regarding the cause of those differences

Question 21

what is falsification for popper?

Answer 21

“knowledge grows through the proposal and falsification of hypotheses”

Question 22

what allows for the development of causal theories for the differences of stimuli?

Answer 22

identifying the features using selective attention as they are used to separate categories