PS261 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Prototype Theory, Object Permanence, Bacon
Document Summary
Generalization and discrimination: the world contains lots of stimuli, similar to each other but not always predicting the same things, need to discriminate and only respond when appropriate, ex. Traffic lights, the red and the green are the same thing but mean two different things: something similar stimuli do predict similar things, need to generalize and respond to both, ex. The traffic light and cross walk lights mean the same things: ex. Defining concepts/ categories: grouping of stimuli that share features or functionality (or some other organizing principle) (have something in common, ex. Thus can tell each other apart: experiment, take pictures of them and then scramble them and see if they still know who it is. The only thing you should learn is the prototype. It might be easier" to learn the category: can test with novel samples, there are differences between species.
