PSY 446 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Empiricism
2 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Conceptual Development
What is a concept?
● General ideas that organize objects, events, qualities, or relations on the basis of some
similarity.
○ Very important
○ Infinite
○ Varying with different experiences
Are there differing perspectives? Of course.
● Nativists- nature side of things, children born with learned concepts, which is specialized
in the brain.
● Empiricist- interactions with people in a social context, experience, exposure NOT
INNATE. General things like memory are nature processes that helps create concepts
like language.
What are the basic categories?
● Theories of physics- Occupying space, two obects can not take up the exact same
space at the same time. Innatimate objects.
● Psychology- understanding of people, that people think, behave, act in certain ways by
the way they feel.
● Biology- understanding of other organisms like plants, animals move and breathe
Testing category formation
● Quinn and Eimas (1996)
○ Cats vs other
■ Kids start to lose interest after showing cat after cat after cat
■ Then show picture of a dog and that spikes their interest
■ Clear baby understand all the cats are different and a dog is different than
a cat.
● Behl-Chadha
○ Mammals vs other
■ Babies then shown a fish after something with four legs
■ Babies understand the different
● Perceptual categorization
Category Hierarchies
● Categories that are related by set-subset relations
○ Superordinate level
■ Most general like
■ Plants more difficult to learn plants have more variety
■ Furniture
○ Basic Level
■ Medium level (start learning here)
■ Tree- easy for little kids to understand the concept of trees, leaves, trunk.
(Share characteristics with other things)
■ Chair
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
General ideas that organize objects, events, qualities, or relations on the basis of some similarity. Nativists- nature side of things, children born with learned concepts, which is specialized in the brain. Empiricist- interactions with people in a social context, experience, exposure not. General things like memory are nature processes that helps create concepts like language. Theories of physics- occupying space, two obects can not take up the exact same space at the same time. Psychology- understanding of people, that people think, behave, act in certain ways by the way they feel. Biology- understanding of other organisms like plants, animals move and breathe. Kids start to lose interest after showing cat after cat after cat. Then show picture of a dog and that spikes their interest. Clear baby understand all the cats are different and a dog is different than a cat. Babies then shown a fish after something with four legs. Categories that are related by set-subset relations.
