Complex cognition task 2

Question 1

a category

Answer 1

a group of objects that have the same properties

Question 2

natural category

artefact category

nominal category

Answer 2

1) category that occurs in the natural world
2) a group of man made objects- designed with a specific function
3) objects or ideas that are put together due to arbitrary characteristics.

Arbitrary: based on preference instead of natural occurrence

Question 3

classical theory of concepts ,

individually necessary, jointly sufficient

category membership

hierarchical order of concepts

Answer 3

concepts contain a rule as well as individual properties that are necessary and features that when together present are

jointly sufficient,

individually necessary

The mind will represent a list of items that are necessarily part of the category

category membership: binary
–> no intermediate solution

–> classification is not affected by context

Question 4

Empirical data that supports the classical theory

Answer 4

Task :

people had to perform categorization on different forms of concepts.

• simple concepts: the object has to be a triangle
• conjunctive concepts: the object has to be a green triangle
• disjunctive concepts : The object has to be either green or a triangle.

–> pp had the hardest time to filter out disjunctive concepts because they had to keep the information in mind.

–> further pp had difficulties to categorize if they had to keep things from previous trials in mind.

–> attention and short term memory are limited–> the binary categories are the fastest and easyest to process

Question 5

whats successive scanning, cervative focusing and focus gambling ?

Answer 5

…

Question 6

What are the counterarguments to this theory ?

Answer 6

theoretical objection:

It is not logical that the information that is often vague can lead to clearcut binary categorisation.

family resemblance:

Members of a family for instance birds can look very different to one another and are still part of one group.

Question 7

Prototype thoerie

Answer 7

the theory states, that humans categorise based on the degree of typicality an item has compared to the prototype.

Typicality gradient:

The prototype has the highest typicality gradient.

the more features fit the higher the typicality gradient is.

Features:

There is not binary system, features are not necessary.

An average of the description of an object/ group member is compared to the prototypes characteristics.

Question 8

Disadvantages of the prototype theory.

Answer 8

this theory assumes that people use superficial features in order to categorise. Typicality is no core concept of a group.

( what about more central attributes, mushrooms l-ook like plants but they are centrally something different)

• does not say anything about the causal mechanisms ( what is meant ? )

Fails to account for the people’s knowledge outside the prototypes boundaries.

• people can judge items on their typicality does not mean that they are represented like this in their head.
• it can not deal with untypicality

Question 9

Exemplar based theory

Answer 9

• exemplars of every category are kept in memory.
• in order to categorise the object is compared to the exemplars .
• every time we see a member of a category we store it with the the other exemplars in memory.

Question 10

Advantages exemplar based theory

Answer 10

• exemplars of every category are kept in memory.
• in order to categorise the object is compared to the exemplars .
• every time we see a member of a category we store it with the the other exemplars in memory.

Question 11

Disadvantage exemplar based theory

Answer 11

• memory storage is limited, with this theory the memory is overloaded.
• dissociation between category and typicality have been demonstrated.
• it does just relate to the way things look. Arbitrary categorization are not taken into account.

Question 12

Explanation based theory

Answer 12

• usage of common sense explanations to categorize things
• the explanations contain superficial and central attributes
• this theory was invented in order to fill the gaps that were created by the other theories.

–> could be seen as a complementary seen, allows to explain how we categorize concepts that are not based on visual objects.

Question 13

Disadvantages explanation based theory

Answer 13

• lack of specificity
• the explanation is based on a concept which is base on the specificity
• the explanations rely on common knowledge which is not guaranteed.

Question 14

Prototype categorization in action

Answer 14

super ordinate: furniture

basic level: chair

subordinate: desk chair

Question 15

Racial essentialism, Essentialism and creativity experiment

Answer 15

Essentialists belief, that racial groups have an underlying inner attribute that differentiates them from other racial groups.

–> fosters stereotypical beliefs and racist behavior.

Creativity in problem solving was measured in a group that got an essentenlist text as priming or a nonessential priming.

• essentialist group scored higher in closed mindedness and less participants could solve the creativity problem.

–> essentialism hinders creativity

Question 16

Psychological essentialism

Genetic essentialism

Answer 16

• generalizes the perception of ethnic groups
• essence gives rise to entities–> the only nature argument

Genes are everything that matters.

There is no nurturing and therefore changing of your character or your way of being.

Question 17

Working Memory rule based categorization system.

Answer 17

three steps:

1) selective attention to each item
2) determining whether the value matches the feature specified in the rule
3) outcome of stage two is identified in order to categorize the object.

Activation in the brain:

• left hemisphere
  inferior parietal cortex,
  parietal occipital cortex

Selective attention:
Right prefrontal cortex

Question 18

Do humans belong with nature? ( Levin 2013)

Answer 18

Human, animals, nature categorisation task.

children at and under the age of 10 + adults got the exercise to categorize humans animals and plants after being primed with the exercise to either describe an experience in nature or talk abstractly about nature.

Results:
Children in the younger stages of development are more likely to group humans with nature than adults or older children.

young children grouped more to nature in the self expressive priming, than the abstract one.

Adults grouped more to nature in the abstract condition.

Question 19

WM based categorisation

Answer 19

rule based categorisation:

• active manipulation
• represents active information that is represented explicitly

prefrontal cortex and posterior parietal areas

Question 20

Explicit Long term memory based categorization

Answer 20

• passive longterm storage in the medial temporal lobe

–> medial temporal lobe is active as well as the the parietal areas and the perceptual areas.

• Similarity based categorization

–> comparing the previously stored items to a prototype.

Question 21

implicit long term memory based categorization

Answer 21

• retrieval without awareness
• perceptual priming categorization
• stimuli that can be categorized through the implicit ltm are difficult to verbalize.
• patients that have damage on the e ltm can still perform tasks with the i ltm.

Question 22

food waste study

Answer 22

Hingston et al
- relation to misformed food is dependent on the experience a person has made before.

• direct contact with the fruit or vegetable ( buying it directly on a farm)

–> prove for the prototypical categorisation theory.

–> the consumers living in rural areas have more contact to misshaped food there fore their prototype of e.g. a carrot changes.

Question 23

study cultural blindness vs. emphasizing ethnic differences (Wilton & Good)

Answer 23

• studies came to an ironic outcome, that emphasizing ethnic and cultural differences does actually reinforce the belief in fixed biological characteristics that underpin them.

Question 24

Applying the categorization theories to evolution

Answer 24

• amimals and humans use familiy resemblance for categorizing
• and prototypes
• bad memory of exemplars–> takes up a lot of storage

example: monkey eagle scream–> categorisation of the eagle

Question 25

Comparing prototype and exemplar based cognitive processing

Answer 25

• monkeys in studies used in the majority prototype processing

Testing the exemplar based approach:
- monkeys learn exemplar processing after many trials- this kind or processing plays a minor role.

• squares that need to be categorised and look exactly like the prototype and squares that need to be processed that dont look like the prototype.

–> monkeys got it only after a lot of trials.

Question 26

causal centrality

Answer 26

• features of a self concept can be causally central or causally peripheral.

–> central features are related to a lot or other peripheral features and weigh more compared to them.

The more important e.g. a political opinion is for a person the more causally central it is.

–> the more affect reactions are caused in the reaction to a critic or change of their political opinion.

Question 27

Study to prove the effect of causally central vs causally peripheral

Answer 27

• the study of Chen et al ( 2016? ) researches the difference between causally central and causally peripheral political attitudes.
• the findings demonstrate that causally central political attitudes lead to more voting behavior in the US elections 2016 than causally peripheral attitudes
• further research showed that people who have causally central feelings of identity towards Great Britain did vote for Brexit significantly more than voters that had causally peripheral attitudes of their identity.

Question 28

basic level effect

Answer 28

• humans tend to categorize in the middle category which is not too specific and not too brought to communicate adequately!
• the level that dissimilarities between categories and similarities within categories

Example :

Superordinate : Furniture

Basic: Chair

Subordinate: Office Chair