PSYCH101 Chapter Notes - Chapter 8: Semantic Network, Linguistic Relativity, Human Brain

• School: University of Waterloo
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYCH101
• Professor: Paul Wehr

Document Summary

Concept: the mental representation of an object, event, or idea. Classical categorization: a theory that claims that objects/events are categorized according to a certain set of rules or by a specific set of features. Graded membership: the observation that some concepts appear to make better category members than others. Prototypes: are mental representations of an average category member. : its advantage help explain why some category members make better examples than others. Semantic network: an interconnected set of nodes and the links that join them to form a. : similar items have more and stronger connections that unrelated items. Researchers have noted that adults integrate new stimuli into categories based on what they have experienced before. Human brain is wired to perceive similarities and differences. How we categorize objects depends to a great extent on what we have learned about those objects from others in our culture. Categorization is based at least to some extent on cultural learning.