Psychology 3130A/B Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Prototype Theory, Family Resemblance, Change Blindness

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

Document Summary

Availability heuristic - thinking or executing a behaviour based on the first similar example that comes to mind. Memory affects the thinking process for better or worse. Risk is assessed via memory for events. Decisions are made according to those risk assessments. But memory is not always reliable change blindness experiment. Memory is designed to generalize, to categorize and to predict. The goal is to subserve other functions and behaviours. Things are recognized and grouped together because they are similar. Memory works by allowing present events to activate previously experienced events as a function of similarity. Members of contrasting categories tend to be dissimilar: subordinate level high similarity within and between categories. We name objects instinctively at the basic level. You don"t tend to list thing at a subordinate level. Children tend to learn basic level categories first: basic level is, faster, listed first, children learn first, contains shorter name. Core assumptions of the classical view of concepts and categories.