PSYCH101 Chapter Notes - Chapter 8: Representativeness Heuristic, Semantic Network, Availability Heuristic

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

Document Summary

Concept - a mental representation of an object, event or idea. Concepts like chair, can be divided into a small group like rocking chair or arm chair. Categories - groups of these related concepts. Form these groups through a process called categorization. Dif cult to de ne categories because it requires elements of perception (like memory) Classical categorization - items/events are categorized base don a speci c set of rules or characteristics. Graded membership - some items t a category better than others. Sentence-veri cation technique - how long it takes you to respond to a statement (such as. A sparrow is a bird (yes) and a penguin is a bird ( . yes)) is how they know that some items t into different categories better than others. Prototype - a mental representation of an average category member (when hearing the word bird, most of us think of something like a robin, not a amingo)