Psychology 3130A/B Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Equivalence Class, Prototype Theory, Exemplar Theory

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 3130A/B
• Professor: John Paul Minda

Document Summary

We rely on concepts to make predictions, infer features and attributes and to generally understand the world of objects. Primitive representations are things like edges, colours, basic shapes and phonemes: need to be processed and structured in some way. Category refers to objects, things or events that can be structured into groups. Concepts refer to the mental representations that denote that category. One possibility is that humans form categories that reflect the natural structure of the world. Stimulus generalization: people categorize things in part because of a natural tendency to generalize. Concepts are natural: the world of objects and things may be self-categorizing, there are regularities in the world. Communication: when we learn to generalize over a whole class of objects, we are usually averaging or summarizing our experience over multiple exposures with a stimulus. Problem solving: people often engage in problem solving strategies and heuristics that involve finding the correct solution from memory.