PSYC 2501 Chapter Notes - Chapter 9.5: Semantic Network, Semantic Memory, Eleanor Rosch
26 Apr 2018
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9.5 Summary of Knowledge and Categorization
• Summary
o Semantic memory is our memory for facts and knowledge
o Categories are points to knowledge
• Once you know something is in a category, you know a lot of general
things about it and can focus your energy on specifying what is special
about this particular object
o The definitional approach to categorization doesn't work because most
categories contain members that do not conform to the definition
• Wittgenstein proposed the idea of family resemblances to deal with the
fact that definitions do not include all members of a category
o The idea behind the prototypicality approach to categorization is that we
decide whether an object belongs to a category by deciding whether it is
similar to a standard representative of the category, called a prototype
• A prototype is formed by averaging category members a person has
encountered in the past
o Prototypicality is a term used to describe how well an object resembles the
prototype of a particular category
o The following is true of highly prototypical objects:
• They have high family resemblance
• Statements about them are verified rapidly
• They are named first
• They are more affected by priming
o The exemplar approach to categorization involves determining whether an
object is similar to an exemplar
• An exemplar is an actual member of a category that a person has
encountered in the past
o An advantage to the exemplar approach is that it does’t discard iforatio
about atypical cases within a category, such as penguin in the "bird" category
• The exemplar approach can also deal more easily with categories that
contain widely varying members, such as games
o Researchers have concluded that people use both approaches to
categorization
• Prototypes may be more important as people initially learn about
categories
• Later, exemplar information may become more important
• Exemplars may work best for small categories (such as US presidents),
and prototypes may work best for larger categories (such as birds)
o The kind of organization in which larger, more general categories are divided
into smaller, more specific categories is called hierarchical organization
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