Cognitive Psychology

• Declarative knowledge


  Knowledge of facts
• Symbolic knowledge


  Knowledge of correspondence between symbols and their meaning
• Concept


  An idea about something that provides a means of understanding the world
• Concepts are not always stable but can change
• Ad hoc categories


  Described not in words but rather in phrases
• Basic level (natural level) of specificity

  A level within a hierarchy that is preferred to other levels
• Category


  A group of items into which different objects or concepts can be placed that belong together
• Types of categories


  • Natural categories
  • Artifact categories
• Feature-based categories


  • Defining features (necessary attributes): features uniquely define the category
  • Attractive because it makes categories appear so orderly and systematic
• Classical concepts


  Categories that can be readily defined through defining features
• The feature-based approach does not work as well as it appears to at first glance, and a violation of those defining features does not seem to change the category we use to define them
• Prototype theory


  Grouping things together by their similarity to an averaged model of the category
• Prototype


  Abstract average of all the objects in the category we have encountered before
• Characteristic features


  Describe (characterize or typify) the prototype but are not necessary for it
• Stereotypes of different groups of people consist of a conglomerate of average features that are typical examples of concepts, but they are not always present
• Fuzzy concepts


  Categories that cannot be so easily defined
• Exemplars


  Typical representatives of a category
• The mind does not have enough resources to store all the exemplars
• VAM (varying abstraction model)


  Use a number of intermediate representations that represent subgroups within the category
• Prototypes and exemplars are just the two extremes on a continuum of abstraction
• Core


  Defining features something must have to be considered an example of a category
• Theory-Based View of Categorization (explanation-based view)

  People understand and categorize concepts in terms of implicit theories, or general ideas they have regarding those concepts
• It is difficult to capture the essence of the theory-based view in a word or two
• There is a distinction between essential, incidental, or accidental features
• Study about the sorp and the doon (Ripps, 1989)

  • When the sorp's features changed through an accident, it was still rated highly as belonging to the category of birds, although participants did not perceive them as very similar to birds
  • When the doon changed through a natural process, it was rated less highly as belonging to the category of birds although it seemed relatively similar to birds
• Essentialism


  Holds that certain categories, such as those of "lion" or "female," have an underlying reality that cannot be observed directly
• Semantic-network models


  Knowledge is represented in our minds in the form of concepts that are connected with each other in a web-like form
• Semantic network


  A web of elements of meaning (nodes) that are connected with each other through labeled relationships
• Inheritance


  Implies that lower-level items inherit the properties of higher-level items
• Semantic feature comparison


  Features of different concepts are compared directly, rather than serving as the basis for forming a category
• Word stem completion


  Participants are presented a prime for a very short amount of time and then given the first few letters of a word and told to complete the stem with the first word that comes to mind
• Mind-mapping can indeed increase knowledge acquisition
• Schemas


  Mental frameworks of knowledge that encompass a number of interrelated concepts
• Characteristics of schemas


  • Can include other schemas
  • Encompass typical, general facts that can vary slightly from one specific instance to another
  • Can vary in their degree of abstraction
• A problem with schemas is that they can give rise to stereotypes
• Script


  Contains information about the particular order in which things occur
• Scripts are less flexible than schemas
• Scripts guide what people recall and recognize—ultimately, what people know
• Jargon


  Specialized vocabulary commonly used within a group, such as a profession or a trade
• Frontal and parietal lobes involve in script generation