Cognitive Psychology
Chapter 7
Concepts and knowledge representation
Concepts: mental representations of classes of items.
When we treat distinct objects as the same as other distinct objects.
To represent all the distinct object that make up the categories concerned.
Dealing in concepts rather than in distinct individual objects is clearly an efficient way to work and emerges as an inevitable result of who the brain responds to stimulation, in that similar stimuli evoke similar activation patterns and by association will arouse similar memories and action tendencies.
Concepts allow us to organize information in long-term semantic memory very efficiently into hierarchical structures.
Overall, our long-term knowledge about the world is based on concepts and relations among concepts. Also, representations of current situations are in terms of concepts.
All higher-level mental concepts involves imagining possible actions in terms of concepts.
Visual images convey information as to what an object looks like and the image associated with a concept would seem likely to be important in using that concept.
Imagery: the mental representations of sensory properties of objects, experienced as like perceiving the object but with less vividness than in reality.
Despite the pervasive role of concepts in cognition, there is no universal agreement on the best way of define concepts in a whole.
Definitional approach
Some concepts are well defined and clear black and white definitions can be given.
Well-defined concepts are the essence of formal subjects such as mathematics and are sought throughout sciences.
Concepts are typically formed from combinations of features that are themselves concepts. Each of these requires its own definition and within a given legal system each would have its own clear criteria.
Many and perhaps most everyday concepts are not so well defined and exhibit a degree of fuzziness. The lack of definitions can have important real life consequences.
Since most concepts that we work with in everyday life are not well defined, a major part of this area of study concerns alternative ways in which ill-defined concepts might be represented and used.
Prototype approaches
Introducing prototypes
Everyday categories have members that vary markedly in how typical they are.
If all concepts were purely definitional and well defined then all examples would be equally representative and decisions about category membership would be clear cut. But over many everyday categories, people reliably judges some examples as more typical of the category than others.
A number of aspects of performance with concepts are affected by typicality (the extend to which an object is representative of
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