Psychology 2135A/B Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Equivalence Class, Eleanor Rosch, Spreading Activation

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 2135A/B
• Professor: John Paul Minda

Document Summary

9:30 am fundamental cognitive mechanisms are recruited to bring structure to the sensory. world. Why categorize all intelligent systems categorize information (non human species are forming categories) efficiency would be overwhelmed with information learning would be impossible without categories -- you would treat every thing you see as something new. Plato suggests we have concepts that cut nature at its joints joints are easier to separate there are natural ways to cut the world into concepts -- they aren"t arbitrary. William james suggests creatures extremely low in the intellectual scale may be able to categorize because they just need to recognize the same experience again in order to learn things you need to have concepts. ****not going to ask how you can tell the difference between prototype and exemplar view so nothing about linear separability***** It takes longer to verify the sentence "a robin is an animal" than the sentence "a robin is a bird".