Thought - Conceptualization PDF - Experimental Psychology - 2024/2025

Thought – Conceptualization Experimental Psychology Course Prof. Federica Biassoni A.Y. 2024/2025 Concepts & Categorization: The Building Blocks of Thought Thought The “Language of the mind” à two modes: propositional thought (expresses proposition/claim) &...

Thought – Conceptualization Experimental Psychology Course Prof. Federica Biassoni A.Y. 2024/2025 Concepts & Categorization: The Building Blocks of Thought Thought The “Language of the mind” à two modes: propositional thought (expresses proposition/claim) & imaginal thought (relates to images that we “see” in our mind). Concept à represents an entire class, is the set of properties we associate with a particular class Concepts & Categorization: Functions of concepts Concept à divides world into manageable units: we treat each object not as a unique but as an instance of a concept à we reduce the complexity of the world à cognitive economy Categorization: assigning an object to a concept à concepts allow us to predict information not readily perceived à predictive power Concepts & Categorization: Prototypes Two sets of properties related to a concept: 1. Prototype: the set of properties that describe the best examples of the concept; is what usually comes to the mind when we think of a concept. The prototype properties are salient but not perfect indicators of the concept membership! 2. Core: all the properties that are most important (central) for being a member of a concept. à Core properties are used to determine the membership of well-defined category (e.g. parent), while prototype properties are typically used to determine the membership of fuzzy concepts (e.g. dog). The more prototype properties an instance has, the more typical of the concept it is considered. Concepts & Categorization: Are our prototypes determined by the culture we belong to, or are they universal? For some concepts the prototype is heavily influenced by culture. For other concepts, such as colours, prototypes appear universal. Concepts & Categorization: Hierarchies of concepts Insert Figure 9.4 Concepts & Categorization: Hierarchies of concepts 1. We know the properties of concepts 2. We know how concepts are related to another à relationships between concepts, hierarchy A concept can be identified ad different levels, however in any hierarchy there is a basic level – the level at which we categorize an object. Basic level concepts: Are the ones used by people when asked to name pictured objects Are the first ones learned by children Are used more frequently Have shorter names Concepts & Categorization: Hierarchies of concepts The basic level APPLE has the most distinctive properties, not shared by other kinds of fruit. The lower level has few Insert Figure 9.4 distinctive properties. The higher level has few properties of any kind. We first categorize the world at the most informative level. Concepts & Categorization: Different categorization processes For well-defined concepts, we may determine how similar an object is to our prototype, we can determine whether a person has the defining properties of the concept (core) ore we can use rule-based categories. For fuzzy concepts, we don’t know enough defining properties to use a rule-based categorization, so we rely on similarity: similarity to prototypes similarity to stored exemplars. Concepts & Categorization: Acquiring concepts Learning cores and prototypes : we can learn about concept in different ways We learn cores of the concepts by explicit teaching (“a concept is…”) We acquire prototypes through experience Learning through experience To learn that the core is a better indicator of a concept membership than the prototype, children need longer time There are two ways in which we can learn a concept through experience: Use exemplar strategy: we compare the new object similarity to stored exemplars, or Hypothesis testing: we analyse new objects searching for the critical properties that are common to known instances (and that we have hypothesized characterize a concept à abstraction, core properties). Concepts & Categorization: The neural basis of concepts & categorization Different neural regions may mediate different kinds of concepts and categorization Within the fuzzy concepts, research suggests the brain stores animal concepts and concepts of artifacts differently. e.g., perceptual regions may be more involved in representing animals from artifacts while functional and motor regions play larger role in representing artifacts from animals Neural differences between categorization based on prototypes and categorization based on stored exemplars Also, rule-based categorization relies on different neural processes than categorization based on similarity