Cognitive Psychology: The Approach of Cognitive Science

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Concept and categories

  • Concepts and categories are central to how humans represent knowledge about the world

~ A concept is a mental representation of a category

~ A category is a set of objects that ‘belong’ together

  • A basic crucial process that allows us
    to organize our experience
    of the world so that we can function in it

~ Good vs bad

~ Safe vs Harmful

The feature approach to categorization
-identifying the necessary and sufficient feature for any category one might choose is not always as easy as it for bachelor
-For instance, uniquely specifies dog- difference in size, color and shape of ears.
-Domesticated is an important feature, it is a category of it own.- comprising dogs, wolves, and others.





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The prototype approach to categorization

A prototype is a version of an entity that one might think
od as the average of the type - representation formed of average
values for the features characterizing the entity.

Categorizing hearistically - instead of doing a complete search which would entail considering every entity in our collections that has features in common with the new one until we find a precise match.

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Experimental evidence for categories

  • Experimenters typically construct artificial situations in the laboratory.
  • The phenomena relating to artificial categories produced in
    laboratory experiments occur in natural categories as well.
  • Important research was carried out fainy early in the game in the perceptual domain of color.

mental representation

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  • We acquire categories, the types of categories, and experimental evidence regarding our hypotheses about categorization.
  • Agnosias - individuals with a particular type of agnosia may well be able to perceive the objects within the category the have lost, but they are no longer able to identify them.
  • Prosopagnosia - the loss of ability to categorize or recognize familiar faces .

The representation of concepts

  • The two are intimately connected- the representations we have
    of the totality of a
    category.
  • From Uncle Joe’s dog, the boy next door’s
    dog, our best friend’s dog, and others.
  • In the intervening period, empirical methods of
    inquiry, based on experiment and observation.
  • The first step after the observations, as always, is the hypothesis.
  • because aspects, or features, of that concept are linked to features of other concepts.

Experimental evidence for propositional networks


  • Priming - based on the activations modes and links associated with a particular concept or proposition.

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The representation of propositions

  • Proposition - some sence complete; not just an
    object - a piece of that fudge cake.
  • A proposition is a unit f meaning that can take a truth value.
  • There is an intimate relationship between propositions
    and language
    • encoding both the concepts from which propositins are
      constructed and the proposition themselves.

Propositional networks

  • Thought rests on the mental representation of propositions

~ thought is associative - moving from one idea to another

  • Association likely due to shared elements in associated thought
  • Associative process work - Hypothesis -
    that meaning and links are stored

In propositional, semantic network.