PSYCH 3GG3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Mental Representation
24 Apr 2017
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Category - a mentally represented grouping of entities (objects, people, actions or events: this is not the only definition of category, but for the sake of this course this is how we"re defining it. Instinct blind to concepts: our concepts are a small subset of possible concepts, we don"t notice the concepts that we don"t have and are instinct blind to the concepts that we do have. Standard biological taxonomies myriad other logically possible categories. Inference - the function of categories and concepts: you"ve never experienced something before, but you have a concept or category about it and therefore you know something about it and its behaviour. Function matters: children who were provided a functional description of something was better at categorizing them than children who were given a description of their features. It is always possible to say whether an item is member of a given category possible to exclude something that does not exactly fit this categorization.
