Cognition Ch. 11 Knowledge

Knowledge

What we learned and know about the world

Embodied Cognition

The theory that shared representations are used for perception, action, and knowledge, and that the body and physical experience help shape cognition

Knowledge

What we learned and know about the world

Embodied Cognition

The theory that shared representations are used for perception, action, and knowledge, and that the body and physical experience help shape cognition

Prototype

Typical or ideal of something

• typicality effects

Exemplars

Categorization

Group items or ideas together and differentiating from different items or ideas

Concepts

Mental representations that correspond to objects or ideas in the world

• Can be concrete —> books and roses

• Can be abstract —> fairness and happiness

Distributed Neural Network

• Semantics networks —> nodes specifically represent pieces of knowledge and information

• Connection, parallel distributed processing —> parallel processing used to handle multiple aspects of information

• Domain-specific hypothesis

• Sensory-functional account

• Knowledge/concepts stored in associations

• Retrieval involves search through pathways

• New events change the strength of associations

• Partial memory experiences —> graceful degradation, déjà vu, reconstructed memories, inferences, spontaneous generalizations.

How Categories are Distinguished and Formed

• Definitions

• Feature-based Categorization

• Similarity or resemblance

• Prototypes and Exemplars

Typicality Effects

Some members of a category are better representations than others

Graded Membership

Some items are closer to the category prototype than others

Sentence Verification Task

• Reveals that ppl are quicker to say examples that are closer to the prototypes than atypical examples

Exemplar-base Categorization

A theory of categorization proposing that we store numerous, previously encountered exemplar from a category in mind and then match new instances to the stored representations when deciding whether or not they belong.

• Actual examples of a cateogry

• Specific examples

• Can predict typicality effect

Ad-hoc Cateogires

Categories defined in terms of goals or themes

• goal-based categories

Connectionism, parallel distributed processing

The representation of knowledge in a distributed manner across connections between multiple nodes.

• Facts are more widely distributed nodes influencing one another in a parallel.

• Spreading Activation

• Parallel processing

• Handles multiple aspects of information in parallel.

Domain-specific hypothesis

The hypothesis that, throughout the course of evolution certain categories of objects gained privileged processing in the brain, leading to specialized circuitry and brain areas.

Sensory-functional Account

The idea that object concepts are grounded in perception and action

• Semantic knowledge is stored based off if it’s primarily sensory or primarily functional

Characteristics of Prototypes

• Variability

• Typical or ideal members of a category

• Judged more quickly after priming

• Share attributes in “family resemblance” and have the largest number of common attributes

Schemas

Organized and generalized knowledge of our world

• Enhance memory

• Represents Scripts

• Activate inference —> relying upon general knowledge in going beyond given text or information (e.g, advertising)

Characteristics of Schemas

• Has variables

• Can be embedded

• Represents knowledge at all levels of abstraction

• Represent knowledge rather than definitions

• Active (reconstructive) recognition device

Scripts

Structure sequence of events in ordinary life

• Getting up in the morning

• Eating at Lottie

• Beginning Class

• Automated phone and answering systems