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Categorical perception - Coggle Diagram
Categorical perception
Concepts and categories
Concepts: internal psychological representations = providing a means of understanding the world. A way of categorising items, ideas and abstractions by their similarities.
E.g. an apple can be captured within a single word, but it relates to many concepts such as round, red/green, crunchy etc.
Categories: class of concepts which share some common properties. Conceptual knowledge can be organised by categorisation.
Categorisation is a fundamental feature of human cognition, senses are constantly bombarded with a wide array of info/concepts.
Fuzzy boundaries: members of categories aren't always clear cut - many have a boundary membership. McCloskey & Glucksberg (1978) - categories often form a continuum - some very clearly a member and others not & some intermediate items.
Typicality: 'better' or 'clearer' members than others. Typical members have properties that are common to many category members & atypical members have properties that are common to few members e.g. a penguin is a less typical member of a bird category than a robin.
Influences of typicality: typical members are rated as part of a category more often (Hampton, 1979). Reaction times are faster to categories a typical member (Rips et al, 1973). Age of acquisition is lower for typical (Mervis & Pani, 1980). Typical members are comprehended during lang processing quicker (Garrod & Sanford, 1977). Typical are usually used first in a sentence (Onishi et al, 2008).
Categorical hierarchy: subordinate (terrier), basic (dog) and superordinate (mammal/animal).
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Developmental approach
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By using pre-linguistic infants - eliminate the problem that participants could be using labelling strategies when making colour category distinctions.
Franklin and Davies (2004): familiarisation - infants spend less time looking at a stimulus which is repeatedly presented. Infants prefer to look at a novel stimulus.
Franklin, Clifford, Williamson and Davies (2005): looked at toddlers who speak english and toddlers who speak himba at the stage of colour term acquisition. Both cultures displayed evidence of CP.
Hemispheric approach
Brain is organised contralaterally: visual projections from the right VF are processed in the LH and vice versa. Expect CP to be greater for stimuli in the right VF.
Franklin et al (2008): used eye movements to compare adults and infants - use time to fixate a target (diff colour circle). as an indices of CP.
LH bias for colour CP in adults. Faster for RVF between category trials. RH bias for colour CP in infants, faster for LVF between category trials.
RH bias for colour CP in toddlers still learning colour terms, LH bias for those who have learnt colour terms.
Maier and Abdel Rahman, 2019)