Flashcards
Concepts
Cards in this deck (16)
- 1Relationship between concepts, categories and wordsWe use words to categorise things and to communicate concepts which are internal representations about categories
- 2What are concepts?* Internal mental representations of categories
* Concepts are individual and influenced by own experience of the world leading to different concept of a category
* Our concepts of things influence our behaviour towards them - 3What are categories?* Those things in the world (external) that concepts are about
* Cognitive economy can be achieved through categorisation - 4Function of categorisation* To group things together into classes and respond to them according to their class membership (Bruner et al 1956)
* To communicate effectively and economically
* People tend to categorise according to their goals or purposes - 5How categorisation is studied?* Sorting task (sorting items into groups) can reveal people's goal or purposes
* Property-listing technique to investigate people's concept by comparing different lists and generating a further list of commonly listed properties to find out what properties are central to the concept
* Typicality ratings are done by asking PPs to rate how typical an item is
* Reaction time experiments as RTs are considered to be shorter for items judged to be more typical
* Discursive approach to show how categorisation is affected by social influences - 6Concepts and Cognition* Memory - concepts are the basic units of semantic memory
* Recognition - semantic classification
* Language - processing involves retrieving lexical concepts from the mental lexicon
* Reasoning - concepts allow us to make inferences about things - 7Theories about concepts* Classical view
* Prototype view
* Common-sense theory (Theory-based approach)
* Psychological essentialism - 8Classical View - Similarity I (Overview)* Concepts are definitions of categories
* Common properties are necessary and sufficient for categorisation (Hull 1920, Bruner et al 1956)
* All members in a category must meet the same definition so an all or nothing approach
* Look for similarity - 9Classical view - Similarity I (Evaluation)- typicality ratings (Rosch 1973) suggests inequalities between category members
- Rips et al 1973 found PPs were quicker to verify typical sentences than atypical sentences suggesting an internal structure of category
- typicality contradicts the all or none view about membership
- Borderline cases found in especially less typical items are inconsistent with the all or none view
- Intransitivity of categorisation contradicts the classical view (Hampton 1982) e.g. car seat, chair, furniture
- Lack of explicit definitions of all categories does not support the view that all members must meet the same definition - 10Prototype Theory - Similarity II (Overview)* Concepts are organised around a central prototype
* Category membership is determined by how similar an item is to the prototype
* Weighting of properties is considered when matching the properties of an instance to a category - 11Prototype Theory - Similarity II (Evaluation)+ Explains typicality effects found
- However, typicality effects are sensitive to context (e.g. animal: milking/cow -v- riding/horse) and therefore changeable which contradicts the stable nature of properties suggested by Prototype view
* Unclear how simple prototype can explain complex concepts
* What counts as similar and dissimilar is not clearly defined - 12Common-sense theories: The Theory-based view (Overview)* People categorise not on the basis of similarity but on the basis of common-sense theories about the world
* Categorisation involves large knowledge structure
* Murphy and Medin suggested categorisation is explanation based and the role of categorisation is to explain behaviour or attributes - 13Common-sense theories: The Theory-based view (Evaluation)* the aged related change in children's categorisation shows deeper causal principles influence categorisation in older children
- The 'Theory' Theory only shows similarity does not explain categorisation. It does not mean categorisation is theory-based
- What constitutes a theory is unclear
- Unclear how theories might combine in complex concepts - 14Psychological Essentialism (Overview)* Attempt to explain how categorisation is influenced by deeper explanatory principles
* People categorise things according to their beliefs about essential properties (this view assumes objects have some common essential properties) - 15Psychological Essentialism (Evaluation)* Acknowledge the importance of essential defining properties (as in Classical view) but Psychological Essentialism implies people do not always know what are the essential properties
- This theory received mixed empirical support (- e.g. Malt 1994 showed PPs did not purely categorise water in the presence or absence of H2O, there are other factors involved) (+ e.g. supporting evidence from development of categorisation studies) - 16Why there is no single generally agreed theory of categorisation?* Categorisation may not be a single process
* There may be different types of category that require different theories to explain our concepts of them
* People may categorise things in different ways according to their needs and stored knowledge
* Not all concepts are the same (clearly defined, fuzzy)
Information
- Description
- Hons Degree DD303 Cognitive Psychology (Concepts) Flashcards on Concepts, created by gloriachan on 28/09/2013.
- Created by
- gloriachan
- Views
- 75
- Tags
- Rating