PSYC 2501 Chapter Notes - Chapter 9.1: Family Resemblance, Hierarchical Organization, Mental Representation
26 Apr 2018
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Chapter 9
Friday, April 13, 2018
3:24 PM
• Conceptual knowledge
o Knowledge that enables us to recognize objects and events and to make
inferences about their properties
o Concepts
• Mental representation of a class or individual
o How do we organized concepts?
• Categories
▪ All possible examples of a particular concept
▪ Categorization
• The process by which things are placed into categories
• Every time we place an object into a category
• Placing an object into a category helps us know more about it
• Assigned the category "cat" gives you a lot more
information about the furry thing that dashed across the
road
• Help us understand behaviors that otherwise might be
confusing
o How are objects placed into categories
• Why definitions don't work for categories
▪ Definitional approach to categories
• We can decide whether something is a member of a category
by determining whether it meets the definition of the category
• Work well for some things, such as geometric objects
• Not all members of everyday categories have the same
features
▪ Family resemblance
• Refers to the idea that things in a particular category resemble
one another in a number of ways
• Led psychologists to propose that categorization is based on
determining how similar an object is to some standard
representation of a category
• Is there a psychologically privileged level of categories?
o Hierarchical organization
• Larger, more general categories are divided into smaller, more specific
categories, creating levels of categories
o Rosch's approach
• Superordinate level
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