PSY 1 Chapter Notes - Chapter 8: Cognitive Psychology, Linguistic Relativity, Dyslexia
Document Summary
Cognition: the mental activity that includes thinking and the understandings that result from thinking. Cognitive psychology is based on two ideas about thinking: Knowledge about the world is stored in the brain in representations. Thinking is the mental manipulation of these representations. Thinking: mental manipulation of representations of knowledge about the world. Analogical representations: mental representations that have some of the physical characteristics of objects; they are analogous to the objects. Maps are analogical representations that correspond to geographical layouts. Symbolic representations: abstract mental representations that do not correspond to the physical features of objects or ideas. Do not have relationships to physical qualities of objects. Ex. the word violin is a symbolic representation because it bears no relationship to the object it names. Categorization: grouping things based on shared properties. Reduces the amount of knowledge we must hold in memory. Concept: a category, or class, of related items; it consists of mental representations of those items.
