Psychology Exam 3: Concepts and Categorization

Concepts and Categorization

• Concepts are mental representations of a category, allowing us to categorize stimuli we have never encountered before.
• Concepts have functions such as categorization of novel stimuli, fast and efficient understanding, and making inferences of knowledge not explicitly stated.

Family Resemblances

• Members of a concept share family resemblances, meaning they may not all share the same attributes, but have common characteristics.
• Examples: birds, chairs, dogs

Levels of Organization (Rosch)

• Superordinate level: the most generic and inclusive level of a conceptual category.
• Basic level: the most useful level of a concept, characterized by neither too much nor too little information.
• Subordinate level: the most restrictive, specific level of a conceptual category.

Sematic Networks

• A structure for how information is stored in long-term (semantic) memory.
• Concepts are represented as nodes, interconnected by links or pathways.
• Activation spreads from concept to concept along connecting pathways, depending on time, distance, and number of concepts activated.

Theories of Concept Representation

Classical View

• People create and use categories based on a system of rules (e.g., a dog has 4 legs, barks, has fur, eats).
• Necessary and sufficient features.
• Pros: easy to generate new concepts.
• Cons: categories not well defined (e.g., tools, ballet).

Probabilistic Approaches

• People abstract the common elements of a particular concept and store an abstracted prototypical representation in memory.
• Prototype: a member of a conceptual category exhibiting a collection of typical features or attributions.
• Prototype theory: based on similarity among members and comparison to standards.
• Pros: allows us to make decisions quickly.
• Cons: categories may be hard to pick out key features.

Exemplar Theory

• People take into account each encounter with members of a category.
• Based on similarity among members and comparison to standards.
• Concepts are represented by any number of specific members of the concept.
• Pros: works well for poorly defined categories (e.g., fruit, sports, mammals).
• Cons: requires multiple comparisons.

Essentialist Approach

• People have a general idea of the essence of particular concepts.
• Members of a category have a fundamental similarity (essence).

Hypothesis Testing Theory

• Proposed by Bruner, Goodnow, and Austin.
• Wholist strategy: responding to all attributes of a conceptual class or category.
• Partist strategy: focusing on a single attribute of a conceptual class or category.
• Concept learning: hypothesis testing about a concept by making guesses about which attributes are essential for defining the concept.

Concept Learning Problems

• Role of confirmatory and disconformity feedback.
• Participants forget their hypotheses.
• Complex concepts: conjunctive and disjunctive concepts.

Real-World Applications

• Applicable in everyday life, such as categorizing objects or people.