Basic Info on Concepts & Categories
A collection of things that share one or more properties.
What is a category?
Name of the area that studies the incidental learning of complex statistical regulartities underlying information.
What is implicit learning?
Theory that says things are categorized by comparing them to prior specific memories of similar things.
What is exemplar (aka instance) theory?
Early influential model created by Collins & Quillian.
What is the hierarchical semantic network model?
Patients with visual agnosia usually have damage to this neural pathway.
What is the what stream? (aka the ventral or occiptiotemporal stream).
The mental representation of a category.
What is a concept?
Name of the task in which people respond to a sequence of lights that have an underlying pattern.
What is serial pattern learning (aka the serial RT task)?
Theory which says we categorize something as a "dog" because it is similar to an "average" dog we have created in our heads.
What is prototype theory?
Term given to semantic networks wherein object properties (such 'breathes' or 'has skin') are only represented at the highest hierarchical level.
What is cognitive economy?
Name given to the finding wherein some patients have trouble identifying some objects (such as animals) but not others (such as tools).
What are category-specific memory impairments?
Type of category that is created 'on the fly' for a specific purpose (like "things to do in the summer").
What is an ad-hoc category?
Task in which people decide whther seemingly random letter strings like VXVPS correspond to an underlying 'grammar'.
What is artificial grammar learning?
Name used to describe a prototype applied to a group of people.
What is a stereotype?
Non-hierarchical model in which activation of one concepts automatically influences the activation of nearby concepts.
What is the spreading activation model?
Theory which claims that knowledge is represented in specific sensory & motor areas, but integrated in the anterior temporal lobe.
What is the hub and spoke model?
Main evidence that someone knows or 'has' a concept.
What is the ability to include members and exlcude non-members?
Name of the category "level" that people use most often in thinking and communicating.
What is the basic level?
Theory claiming that categorization occurs by the application of multiple, implicit forms of knowledge.
What is explanation or knowledge-based categorization?
Task in which people are shown letters strings and must decide asap whether they are real words or not.
What is the lexical decision task?
Part of the brain that consistently activates when people are doing verbal, semantic processing.
What is the left pre-frontal cortex (PFC)?
Two of the four main things that concepts and categories do for us.
What is reduce compelxity, allow rapid identification & action, reduce the need for learning, and provide the basis for new learning?
Name of the phenomenon, found in many tasks, in which more common examples of a category are considered 'better' & reponded to faster.
What are typicality effects?
The idea that some things have an underlying, immutable nature that make them what they are.
What is psychological essentialism?
General name given to knowledge models that use neuron-like nodes, hidden units, and which show 'graceful degredation' when damaged.
What are connectionist models? (aka. neural networks or parallel distributed processing models).
Name given to the finding that brain areas associated sensory & motor actions are activated when processing words related to those actions.
What is semantic sematotopy?