PSYCH 1X03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Prototype Theory, Exemplar Theory, Stereotype
22 Jan 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Our everyday decisions rely on quick categorization abilities. Attention - focus finite mental resources on key parts of active scene. Memory - help recall specific thoughts and behaviours appropriate to current needs. These both rely on cognitive ability to categorize ideas, people and objects; efficiently helps processing and response. This is important because without this ability, every decision becomes overwhelming. Predicting - uses past experiences to know what to expect. Communication - words refer to some type of concept/category. Illusion of the expert: feeling that a task must be simple for everyone because it is simple for oneself. Simple, rather than complex categories susceptible to the illusion of the expert. Ex: it is difficult to define abstract concepts such as beauty, love, justice. Categorization occurs when we compare them to an internal best representation of a given category. Formed through experiences; average representation of all personal experiences. New objects are compared to the average representation in prototype theory.
