PSYC20007 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Eleanor Rosch, Escherichia Coli, Peripheral Vision
10 May 2018
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Lecture 3
- Categorisation - something we do naturally and comes automatically
- Whenever we put something into category - means foregoing other attributes/aspects of that
person/object/piece of information
- Categorisation is the engine of cognition (doing a lot of the work involved in how we
automatically process info)
- Categorisation - the ability to form equivalence classes of discriminable entities; subcategories
under categories
- Categorisation - the pulsating heartbeat of thought; at every moment we are faced with
an indefinite number of overlapping and intermingling situations; understanding the world
involves the automatic and effortless evocation of categories; at any moment in time our
senses are being impinged on by overlapping and intermingling sensations → use
automatic categorisation process to segment things out and make sense of them
- Categorisation is necessary for survival - provides a basis of deciding what constitutes
appropriate action
- E.coli → nutrient vs non-nutrient
- Benefits of forming categories:
- → provides a means for identification; once you know category of something, allows you
to interpret all the other ambiguous features (gives meaning to them, know what object
is, what it should do and how it should function)
- → reduces the complexity of the environment, allows organisation of knowledge; rather
than remember everything about environment we can simplify environment into different
categories; more than 7 million discriminable colours
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- → allows for generalisation; as similarity decreases willingness to say something belongs
to same category drops off very quickly (all animals do it);
- Categorisation induction: generalisation at multiple levels → induction: generalising from
the particular to the general; given a set of examples, what is the general conclusion that
one could draw
- Following examples illustrate 5 key empirical effects that help us understand generalisation:
categorisation and generalisation, typicality of instances, typicality of generalisation, category
size, category variability
- The more examples given → the more willing to generalise to entire category
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- Higher rating to first example than second example
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- Generalisation is greater to more typical category members
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