Week 13 Flashcards
Basic-level category
The neutral, preferred category for a given object, at an intermediate level of specificity
category
A set of entities that are equivalent in some way. Usually the items are similar to one another
Concept
The mental representation of a category
Exemplar
An example in memory that is labeled as being in a particular category
Psychological essentialism
The belief that members of a category have an unseen property that causes them to be in the category and to have the properties associated with it
Borderline items
- Borderline members are not clearly in or clearly out of the category
- Because of this categories are fuzzy and have unclear boundaries that can shift over time
Typicality
some items in a category seem to be better members than others
family resemblance theory
Proposed that items are likely to be typical if they have the features that are frequent in the category and do not have the features in other categories
(robins vs penguins - robins are more typical birds than penguins)
Sensorimotor stage
- birth to 2 years old
- children come to represent the enduring reality of objects
- Children’s thinking is largely realized through their perceptions of the world and their physical interactions with it
Preoperational reasoning stage
- 2 to 6 or 7 years old
- children can represent objects through drawing and language but cannot solve logical reasoning problems such as conservation problems
- tend to focus on a single dimension
Concrete operations stage
- Piagetian stage between ages 6/7 and 12
- children can think logically about concrete situations but not engage in systematic scientific reasoning
formal operational stage
- 11 or 12 through the rest of their life
- adolescents may gain the reasoning powers of educated adults
Continuous development
Ways in which development occurs in a gradual incremental manner, rather than through sudden jumps
Depth perception
The ability to actively perceive the distance from oneself of objects in the environment
Discontinuous development
Development that does not occur in a gradual incremental manner