PSYCO258 Lecture Notes - Lecture 19: Semantic Network, Spreading Activation, Hierarchical Organization
14 Mar 2019
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Document Summary
Exemplars may work best for small categories: simple explanation for typicality effects, can easily take into account atypical cases (i. e. flexible) and deal with variable categories. Prototypes may work best for larger categories (storing large numbers of exemplars can become daunting, prototypes may be more efficient in some cases) To fully understand how people categorize objects, one must consider both properties of objects and how these become integrated through learning and experience. Hierarchical organization may be a relevant mechanism for organizing the relationships between properties and particular categories: can distinguish between global, basic, and special levels. Going above basic level results in a large loss of information, going below results in little gain of information (implies balance!) Semantic networks demonstrate cognitive economy (i. e. efficient organization) inheritance refers to the convention that lower-level items share properties of higher-level items: shared properties are only stored at higher-level nodes, exceptions are stored at lower nodes.
