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Description
Flashcards by gloriachan, updated more than 1 year ago
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Created by gloriachan
over 10 years ago
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| Question | Answer |
| Relationship between concepts, categories and words | We use words to categorise things and to communicate concepts which are internal representations about categories |
| What 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 |
| What are categories? | * Those things in the world (external) that concepts are about * Cognitive economy can be achieved through categorisation |
| Function 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 |
| How 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 |
| Concepts 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 |
| Theories about concepts | * Classical view * Prototype view * Common-sense theory (Theory-based approach) * Psychological essentialism |
| Classical 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 |
| Classical 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 |
| Prototype 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 |
| Prototype 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 |
| Common-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 |
| Common-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 |
| Psychological 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) |
| Psychological 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) |
| Why 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) |
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