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1
Q

Define conceptual knowledge.

A

Knowledge that enables us to recognise objects and events and to make inferences about their properties.

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2
Q

What does conceptual knowledge include?

A

Concepts.

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3
Q

What are concepts?

A

The mental representation of a class or individual, and the meaning of objects, events and abstract ideas.

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4
Q

What is a category?

A

A structure that include all possible examples of a concept (ie. the category ‘cats’ includes breeds of cats).

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5
Q

Define categorisation.

A

The process by which things are placed in categories.

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6
Q

Give another name for categories.

A

Pointers to knowledge.

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7
Q

Being able to place things in categories can help us to understand what?

A

Behaviours that we would otherwise find confusing, like people dressing as monsters, which is acceptable on Halloween.

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8
Q

According to the definitional approach to categorisation, how do we decide whether something is part of a category?

A

By determining whether the object meets the definition of the category.

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9
Q

What do definitions work for, and what do they not?

A

Geometric shapes, but not for most natural objects and human-made objects.

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10
Q

Who proposed the idea of family resemblance to deal with the problem that definitions do not include all members of a category?

A

Wittgenstein.

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11
Q

What does family resemblance mean (with reference to categories)?

A

The idea that things in a particular category resemble one another in a number of ways.

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12
Q

What does the family resemblance approach allow for?

A

Variation within categories.

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13
Q

What has family resemblance lead psychologists to propose about categorisation?

A

It is based on determining how similar an object is to some standard representation of a category.

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14
Q

How are objects placed in categorised according to the prototype approach to categorisation?

A

Membership in a category is determined by comparing the object to a prototype that represents the category.

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15
Q

What is a prototype?

A

A typical member of the category.

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16
Q

What did Rosch propose about the typical prototype?

A

It is based on an average of members of a category that are commonly experienced.

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17
Q

Describe the typical prototype of the prototype approach to categorisation?

A

The prototype is not an actual member of the category, but an average representation of the category.

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18
Q

How does Rosch describe variations within categories?

A

Representing differences in typicality.

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19
Q

What does high typicality mean?

A

A category member closely resembles the prototype.

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20
Q

How did Rosch and Mervis find that there is a strong relationship between family resemblance and prototypicality?

A

Similar objects, like chairs and sofas, that are both consumed under the category ‘furniture’ have high family similarity and high prototypicality.

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21
Q

What is sentence verification technique?

A

A procedure to determine how rapidly people answer questions about an object’s category.

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22
Q

Who developed sentence verification technique?

A

Smith.

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23
Q

What is the typicality effect?

A

The ability to judge highly prototypical objects more rapidly.

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24
Q

Give three aspects of prototypical objects, relating to the typicality effect.

A

People can judge them faster, they are generally named first when listing items from a category, and they are affected more by priming.

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25
When does priming occur?
When presentation of one stimulus facilitates the response to another stimulus that usually follows closely in time.
26
Who demonstrated that prototypical members of a category are more affected by a priming stimulus than nonprototypical members?
Rosch.
27
Give the four effects of prototypicality.
Family resemblance typicality, naming and priming.
28
How is the exemplar approach similar to the prototype approach?
It also recognises the wide variation among items that belong to a particular category.
29
What does the exemplar approach to categorisation involve?
Determining whether an object is similar to other objects.
30
How is the exemplar approach different to the prototype approach?
The standard for the prototype approach is a single average member of the category, while the standard for the exemplar approach involves many examples.
31
What is an exemplar?
Actual members of the category that a person has encountered in the past.
32
How does the exemplar approach explain the typicality effect?
By proposing that objects that are like more of the exemplars are classified faster.
33
What is hierarchical organisation?
A kind of organisation where larger, more general categories are divided into smaller, more specific categories.
34
Give Rosch's three levels of categories.
Superordinate/global, basic, and subordinate/specific.
35
Why did Rosch believe that the basic level of categorisation is psychologically special?
Because going above it results in a large loss of information, and going below results in little gain of information.
36
In order to fully understand how people categorise objects, we need to consider what?
The properties of the objects and the learning and experience of the people perceiving those objects.
37
What does the semantic network approach propose?
Concepts are arranged in networks.
38
What was the first semantic network models based on the work of, and what where they investigating?
Quilian, who wanted to develop a computer model of human memory.
39
Why is Quillian and Collins' model hierarchical?
Because general levels are higher, and specific levels are lower.
40
What is cognitive economy?
Part of Quillian and Collins' model, where shared properties are stored at a higher node than the specific ones, to save storage space.
41
What kind of problem does cognitive economy create, and how is it dealt with, according to Quillian and Collins' approach?
Not all of the specific categories will share features with the basic category, but some lower nodes have specifications that differentiate them from the higher nodes shared properties.
42
What is the testable prediction for hierarchical organisation?
The time that it takes to retrieve information about a concept should be determined by the distance that must be travelled through the network.
43
Define spreading activation.
Activity that spreads out along any link that is connected to an activated node.
44
What is the result of spreading activation?
The additional concepts that are activated become primed and can be retrieved from memory more easily.
45
How did Meyer and Schvaneveldt study the effects of spreading activation on priming?
The lexical decision task.
46
What is the lexical decision task?
Subjects read stimuli, and indicate as quickly as possible whether each entry is a word or not.
47
What was the result of Meyer and Schvaneveldt's test examining priming?
Reaction time was faster when the two words were associated.
48
What can't Quillian and Collins' model explain and why? (2)
The typicality effect, and cognitive economy, as it has been proven that people store specific parts of concepts right at the node for the concept.
49
Who proposed connectionism?
McClelland and Rumelhart.
50
Why has connectionism gained such support? (3)
It is based on how information is represented in the brain, and can explain how concepts are learned and how damage to the brain affects people's knowledge about concepts.
51
What is connectionism?
An approach to creating computer models for representing cognitive processes.
52
What is a parallel distributed processing (PDP) model?
A model of connectionism that proposes that concepts are represented by activity that is distributed across a network.
53
What are units, from connectionism inspired by?
Neurons.
54
What are input units?
Units activated by stimuli from the environment.
55
Where do input units send information?
Hidden units, which send information to output units.
56
What is a connection weight?
A feature of a connectionist network, which determines how signals sent from one unit either increase or decrease the activity of the next unit.
57
What do connection weights correspond with?
What happens at a synapse that transmits signals from one neuron to another.
58
What do high connection weights result in?
A strong tendency to excite the next unit.
59
What do low connection weights result in?
Less excitation of the next unit, compared to a high connection weight.
60
What do negative connection weights result in?
Decreased excitation or inhibition of activation of the receiving unit.
61
According to connectionism, activation of units in a network therefore depend on two things:
The signal that originates in the input units, and the connection weights throughout the network.
62
According to connectionism, a stimulus presented to the input units is represented by what?
The pattern of activity that is distributed across the other units.
63
How is a connection network trained to activate only relevant property units?
Back propogation, where an incorrect response for irrelevant property units cause an error signal to be sent back through the network.
64
How are connectionist networks created?
By a learning process that shapes the networks, so information about each concept in contained in the distributed pattern of activity across a number of units.
65
What is graceful degradation?
Disruption of performance occurs only gradually as parts of the system are damaged.
66
How do connectionist networks explain generalisation of learning?
Concepts have similar properties, so training the network to recognise one concept influences learning of other relating concepts.
67
What is a category-specific memory impairment?
An impairment in which they lost the ability to identify one type of object but could still identify other objects.
68
Define the sensory-functional (S-F) hypothesis.
Our ability to differentiate living things and artifacts depends on a semantic memory system that distinguishes sensory attributes and a system that distinguishes function.
69
What does the semantic category approach propose?
There are specific neural circuits in the brain for limited numbers of categories that are innately determined because of their importance for survival.
70
Who created the semantic category approach?
Mahon and Caramazza.
71
What does the semantic category approach focus on, regarding the brain? (2)
Areas of the brain that are specialised to respond to specific types of stimuli, and the brain's response to items from a particular category is distributed over different cortical areas.
72
What idea is central to the multiple-factor approach?
Distributed representation.
73
Define the multiple-factor approach.
Focuses on searching for more factors that determine how concepts are divided up within a category.
74
What did Hoffman and Ralph find about what we associated concepts with?
Animals are more highly associated with motion and colour, and artifacts are associated with performed actions.
75
What did Hoffman and Ralph find about mechanical devices?
They have a widely distributed semantic representation that includes regions important for the representation of both living things and artifacts.
76
What is crowding used to differentiate between?
Animals and artifacts.
77
What is crowding?
Animals tend to share many properties, while cars and other artifacts share fewer.
78
What has crowding led to, regarding the concept of category-specific impairments?
Some researchers are arguing that people don't actually develop a category-specific impairment, but instead have difficulty distinguishing between items that have similar features.
79
What does the embodied approach state?
Our knowledge of concepts is based on reactivation of sensory and motor processes that occur when we interact with the object.
80
Explain the embodied approach, using an object as an example.
When we use an object, sensory areas are activated in response to the shape, size and colour of the objects. Simultaneously, motor areas involving the use of the object are activated. Later, when we see the object again, the same areas are activated, which is the information which represents the object.
81
Who discovered mirror neurons?
Gallese.
82
What do mirror neurons do?
They respond to a specific action made by the individual, but also respond when they see another person perform the same action.
83
What do mirror neurons have to do with the embodied approach of categorisation?
The link between perception and motor responses is central to the idea that concepts cause activation of perceptual and motor areas associated with concepts.
84
Define semantic somatotopy.
The correspondence between words related to specific parts of the body and the location of brain activity.
85
What did Hauk find that supports the embodied approach's view that perceptual and motor experiences are linked?
Activation for perceptual and motor experiences for specific words and movements are located in roughly the same brain areas.
86
Give a piece of evidence that conflicts with the embodied approach to categorisation.
People with brain damage can still recognise objects, but have difficulty demonstrating the correct motor response, which conflicts with the embodied approach's idea that perceptual and motor responses are linked.
87
What does the embodied approach fail to explain.
Knowledge of abstract concepts.
88
What is semantic dementia?
A general loss of knowledge for all concepts.
89
What are people with semantic dementia equally deficient in identifying?
Living things and artifacts.
90
Damage in which brain area is associated with semantic dementia?
The anterior temporal lobe (ATL).
91
Define the hub and spoke model of semantic knowledge.
Areas of the brain associated with specific functions are connected to the ATL, which serves as a hub that integrates information from those areas.
92
What support is there for the hub and spoke model?
Damage to a specialised brain area causes specific deficits, but damage to the ATL causes general deficits.
93
What technique has been used to examine the hub and spoke model?
Transcranial magnetic stimulation.
94
How does transcranial magnetic stimulation work?
It disrupts the functioning of a particular brain area by applying a pulsating magnetic field to the skull.
95
What did Pobric find regarding the hub and spoke model of semantic knowledge and transcranial magnetic stimulation?
Stimulation of the ATL with TMS caused a general slowing of response time for both living things and artifacts, while stimulating the parietal cortex resulting in slowing of more specific responses, supporting the hub and spoke model.

Cognitive Psychology (6 decks)

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