Conceptual and representational development: developing concepts

Conceptual and representational development: developing concepts

1. Understand the system by understanding how it gets to where it is and changes over time. Can address fundamental questions about psychology ie nature/nuture.

   • developmental psych spans life but also certain stages. all of psych with particular mindset.

2. Convo with child about a meal at midday, child says its not lunch no sandwiches involved. Finds it cure because of conceptions and ideas we bring to how this convo should work

3. Concept: an abstract idea of a category

   • Category: a collection of elements of a single kind or class ( a group defined by a common property all members share)
     • Categorisation : process of applying concepts to real world. object or event is a member of a more general category
   • Example : women at front of lecture hall, the concept we bring to what it means to be there allows us to make an inferences shes lecturer, in categorising this person as a professer allows additional inductive inferences; shes knows more than us; been in higher education. BUT we could be wrong, could be a foreperson of a demolition team
     • Even recognising someone is inductive reasoning, someone who worries about accidents its probably kim. fairly accurate

4. You need to know about environment to survive, you only know about your environment via induction

   • Mental structures-like concepts- allow more accurate/detailed inferences
     • Determines how you interact with/predict behaviour of woman in class (liable to be wrong but don't sweat the small stuff)
     • Anyone could do nearly anything all the time don't waste resources considering most possibilities

5. Our concepts determine the inferences we can make. Do a bad job teaching math, we don't understand how people represent mathematical concepts

   • Humans routinely solve interesting problems (and are unique) creating language, long distance communication, physics. ie. worst animation message communicated, people still figure it illogical but still make inferences from it (amazing)
     • Understanding how we solve these problems means understanding how we represent the world and make inferences
     • Catergorise these objects and know whats happening between them (inferences) from just a bit of info

6. We have concepts of objects, spatial relations, causes etc. what that object is and what that object is doing, make inferences from this

   • We have these concepts to understand reason about, and survive in the world. We extend concept to novel entity, we treat novel entity as member of the familiar class, we extend properties (often widely unobservable) of the class to the novel entity

7. Where do concepts come from? How we catergorise depends on how we mentally represent both the observed instances, and the categories. To catergorise must compare mental representation of the instance to a mental representation of the category

   • If image on retina matches image in mind thats recognition ie cat 4 questions what is the info that let's us know its a cat? what is the format (does it scratch?) How do we learn it? What constitutes a match?
   • Classic view: a theory of content, not format. Concepts are like definitions: info you have is definitions in your head, understand world in terms of this, concepts specify sufficient definition qualifies as member ie triangle
     • Wittgenstein: Theres a PROBLEM- whats the definition of a 'game? hard to define, game because similar to other games, football, solitare. Categories more like "family-resemblance" structures

8. Prototype theory: concepts represented by a prototypical members. Best example or featural average of members

   • Prototypes share most features with other members, has more features in common with most common members, listed earliest and most frequently when asked to name category members(if it is "best example"), most typical example
     • Franks & Bransford (1971) prototype effect: study distortions (exemplars) pf pro (but never see pro) more common or less common. Then study old and new distoritions plus protoype, rate confidence they had seen each exemplar during the study phase. Result: Confidence predicted by similarity to pro, unrelated to having seen exemplar or not. most people confident they had seen pro. violates idea of memory
   • Prototype is the concept (i.e the mental representation of the category) "dogs" concept = prototypical dog. store dog prototype, not examples. If dog1 is about the same as prototype then is catergorised as a dog. Prototype are lists of weighted features (content and format) ie. 4 legs .99, fur,.90 tail.72
     • Even infants shows prototype effect, look at violations of the prototype they have seen before (younger & Gottlieb, 1988)
       • + naturally account for prototype effects, learnable catergory structure - does not capture varience
         • Where does the boundary for being labelled get drawn i.e when are you not a cat "big cat" not really a cat