Knowledge - Concepts and Generic Knowledge

Family Resemblance

The idea that members of a category resemble one another. This is usually based on a set of features shared by a subset of this category, meaning that all members of the category may NOT have this set of features, which means that the standard for family resemblance may shift from subset to subset.

Prototype

The ‘best’ example of a category. The category’s ‘center’.

Typicality

The degree to which a specific case (object, situation, or event) is typical for its kind. 

Graded Membership

The idea that some members of a category are ‘better’ members, and therefore more suitable to be in that category or a stronger representation.

Sentence Verification Task

An experiment used to study memory in which participants are given sentences such as “Cats are animals,” and must determine, as quickly as possible, if the sentence is true or false. 

Production Task

An experimental procedure in which is used to study concepts, where a person is asked to list as many of something as possible (as many fruits, as many dog breeds, etc). 

Rating Task

A task in which a particpant is asked to rate an object in terms of some dimension, usually with a number rating. For example, they may be asked to rate on a scale of 1 (typical) - 7 (atypical) how typical a bird is in the category of birds.

Basic-Level Categorization

A level of categorization hypothesized as the ‘natural’ and most informative level, neither too specific (subordinate) nor too general (superordinate).

Exemplar-Based Reasoning

Reasoning that draws from specific examples, rather than more general knowledge of a category.

Anomia

(UH-NAME) A type of disorder in which a person loses the ability to name certain objects.

Hub and Spoke Model

The anterior temporal lobe is the ‘hub’ that connects and integrates information from many different areas of the brain. The ‘spokes’ are the more specific areas that store specific elements of that concept, such as visual information stored in a visual area.

Propositions

The smallest unit of knowledge that can be either true or false.

Connectionist Networks

A proposed system of knowledge representation that rely on distributed representations, and that therefore relies on parallel distributed processing to operate on elements of the representations.  

Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP)

A system of handling information in which many steps happen AT ONCE.