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.
- encoding both the concepts from which propositins are
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.