Categorization Basics
This level of categorization, described by Rosch, is the one most commonly used in everyday language.
What is the basic level?
Higher prototypicality is associated with this kind of family resemblance between items.
What is strong family resemblance?
This lobe of the brain is primarily responsible for visual perception.
What is the occipital lobe?
This theory by Paivio explains why concrete words create strong, memorable associations.
What is the conceptual peg hypothesis?
This type of ambiguity occurs when a single word (like “ring”) has multiple possible interpretations.
What is lexical ambiguity?
This approach to categorization relies on the “average” mental representation formed from many examples.
What is the prototype approach?
In typicality studies on fruit, these items tend to be primed more strongly when people hear the category label.
What are highly typical items (e.g., banana over kiwi)?
Kosslyn’s mental scanning research supports this form of representation—one that resembles actual space.
What are spatial representations?
This memory technique uses mental “locations” to organize information for recall.
What is the method of loci?
This effect explains why we recognize high-frequency words faster than low-frequency ones.
What is the word frequency effect?
This effect states that highly typical category members are processed faster than less typical ones.
What is the typicality effect?
This term explains why some items (like “robin”) are processed faster as category members than others (like “penguin”).
What is the typicality effect?
In a mental rotation task, the cognitive operation being measured is based on this type of mental representation.
What is spatial imagery?
This imagery-based method links items to a list of rhyming words (e.g., “one-sun”).
What is the pegword technique?
In the candy-factory analogy, this process acts like slicing a continuous piece of taffy into smaller pieces.
What is speech segmentation?
These are specific category examples stored from past personal experience, used to make classification decisions.
What are exemplars?
Knowing more examples of one category item than another reflects this theorized structure of categories.
What is exemplar representation?
Imagery tasks involving abstract meanings (like imagining “ethics”) are least likely to strongly activate this brain area.
What is the visual cortex?
These two kinds of mental representation—one image-like, one language-like—offer different explanations for how imagery works.
What are spatial and propositional representations?
This component of language refers to meaning, while another component refers to sentence structure.
What are semantics and syntax?
According to research on expertise, this level of categorization shifts depending on how much a person knows about the topic.
What is the basic level?
(Experts often shift the basic level downward to subordinate.)
This phenomenon explains why hearing a category label can activate some category members more strongly than others, based on how well they match internal representations.
What is category priming influenced by prototypicality?
Moving closer to an imagined object causes this change in the mental visual field.
What is the object taking up more of the visual field?
Using imagery to tie two items together works because imagery enhances memory through these associative principles.
What are dual-coding and elaborative connections?
Words with one dominant meaning versus words with several roughly equal meanings illustrate these two forms of meaning dominance.
What are biased dominance and balanced dominance?