PSYCH 1F03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Exemplar Theory, Numbers Game, Prototype Theory
2 Mar 2017
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Document Summary
Your interactions with the world are flooded with colors, shapes, textures, smells, tastes and sounds. Yet you can make sense of it all and take appropriate action. Two cognitive mechanisms: attention, helps you focus finite mental resources on key parts of the active scene, memory, help you recall specific thoughts/behaviours appropriate to current needs. Cognitive ability to put people, objects and ideas into categories and concepts helps you efficiently process through the incoming data stream and make appropriate responses. Decisions are made ore efficient by ability to quickly categorize incoming stimuli. Making a simple decision (giving up your seat on a bus) becomes an overwhelming task. Without cognitive ability to categorize, every sensory experience would be unique. You would be lost in an ocean of experiences, unable to draw connections with past and being forced to make unique decisions on most routine actions. Like attention and memory, categorization happens so seamlessly, its easy to take it for granted.
