PSYC 3100 Chapter Notes - Chapter 7: Reciprocal Altruism, Eleanor Rosch, Cognitive Architecture
16 Sep 2013
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We group things, places, situation, and even people into categories. The ability to learn concepts is affected by the number of relevant and irrelevant dimensions. However eleanor rosch said that many natural categories categories people spontaneously form outside the psychology laboratory have an internal structure; this is demonstrated through typicality. In the real word categories items exhibit different degrees of membership: categorizes are fuzzy, for example a robin is central/typical of the category, but penguin would be on the periphery. Rosch said natural categories are structured by typicality, that is, by a recognition that some items are more and some items are less central to the category. Typicality must affect how items are stored in memory because reaction time depends on typicality. Typicality affects how we think about the item: things that are more typical have more common features. Typicality-based categories reflect the nested hierarchy of relatedness among living things.
