PSYCH101 Chapter Notes - Chapter 8: Functional Fixedness, Representativeness Heuristic, Semantic Network

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

Document Summary

Psych 101- chapter 8 (thought and language) notes. Concept: the mental representation of an object, event, or idea. Each of these concepts can be divided into smaller groups with more precise labels or can be put together under one single label. Categories: to refer to these clusters of interrelated concepts categorization. Classical categorization: this theory claims that objects or events are categorized according to a certain set of rules or by a specific set of features. Does not tell the full story of how categorization works. Graded membership: the observation that some concepts appear to make better category members than others. Volunteers wait for a sentence to appear in front of them on a computer screen and respond as fast as they can with a yes or a no answer to statements. Prototypes: are the mental representations of an average category member. No rules or definitions are involved, just a set of similarities in over all shape and function.