PSYC 1000 Chapter Notes - Chapter 27: Margaret Floy Washburn, Hominidae, Paul Slovic

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 1000
• Professor: Jeffrey Yen

Document Summary

Psychologists who study cognition focus on the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating information. One of these activities is forming concepts mental groupings of similar sitting objects, events, ideas, and people. We often form our concepts by developing prototypes a mental image or best example of a category. Matching new items to a prototype provides a quick and easy method for sorting items into categories (as when comparing feathered creatures to a prototypical bird, such as a robin) Concept chair there are man different kinds of chairs but they are all for or car the more readily we recognize it as an example of the concept. Concepts speed and guide our thinking but they don"t always make us wise. Once we place an item in a category, our memory of it later shifts toward the: the more closely something matches our prototype of a concept - bird. One tribute to our rationality is our problem-solving skill.