PSY 260 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Mental Rotation, Eleanor Rosch, Prototype Theory
19 Sep 2016
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Concept: your knowledge about a particular thing or event; a unit of knowledge in semantic memory: a chair has a seat, back, 4 legs and is something you sit on. Category: a group of related concepts in semantic memory: dining room chairs and living room chairs are both part of your chair category. Categorization: the process of assigning a new piece of information to one of these groups. Categories help us to identify objects: they confine recognition to a smaller group of items, thereby making it faster and more accurate. Categories allow us to ignore the variability between the objects in a group: our category for the letter a captures the essential features of that pattern, allowing us to ignore the non-essential variability. Color variability: our visual system is capable of discriminating about 7 million different colors, yet we only use about 7-10 color names, our color categories allow us to ignore subtle differences in color.
