Cognitive Psychology 1 - Categorization

Vocabulary flashcards for reviewing key concepts in categorization.

Categorization

Segmenting the continuous perceptual stream into meaningful elements. An automatic, unconscious process.

Discrimination (in categorization)

Representing similar items in distinct categories.

Generalization (in categorization)

Representing distinct items in identical categories.

Concept

Internal mental representations that can be communicated to others.

Accommodation and Assimilation

During development, the processes of adjusting to new information and integrating it with existing knowledge.

Prototype

A signature exemplar having the most typical features of a category.

Exemplar

A set of already encountered elements that serves as a basis for categorization.

Theory-based categorization

Categorization as a problem-solving skill where features are weighted based on labels.

Categorization in animals

Categorization leading to different stimulus-response coupling; simplest forms: new or familiar, desirable or undesirable, safe or not.

Chemotaxis

Categorization of the environment solely by receptors.

Testing animal categorization

Using behavioral or neural outputs to determine categorization in the absence of verbality.

Functional similarity

Representing monkey sounds differently by humans and Syke’s monkeys, indicating categorization based on function.

Abstract categorization

Learning relationships of multiple objects and discriminating them, as seen in corvids.

Developmental perspective on categorization

Categorization based on perceptual similarity evident in infants as young as 3-4 months old.

Memory systems

Modeling long-term memory by content and short-term memory as working memory.

Working memory and categorization

Categorization primarily done by working memory when there are few examples or simple logical reasoning.

Episodic and semantic memory

Brain region that is mostly used when category learning encourages memorization or when there is a pre-learned conceptual relationship between categories.

Key features of categorization

Discrimination and Generalization. The trisynaptic pathway (TSP) helps separate highly similar patterns, and the monosynaptic pathway (MSP) helps generalizing based on similarity.

Procedural memory

Learning that is incremental, with feedback often provided, related to motoric skill learning and basal ganglia.

Clinical psychology

Categorization process as psychiatric diagnostic using correlated features for each diagnosis (DSM).

Social categorization

Emphasis on ingroup similarities and outgroup differences.

Developmental psychology related to speech

Emphasis on speech sound perception categorically, where categories function as perceptual magnets.

Semantic memory

An amodal knowledge base of noetic representations, lacking the subjective, mental time-travel aspect of the episodic system.

Hierarchical organization of semantic memory

Organization of concepts into superordinate, basic, and subordinate levels, with the basic level being the most informative and distinctive.

Semantic distance

A flexible, context-dependent way of organizing semantic storage, modelled based on associations and computational methods in corpora.

Embodiment

Where abstract cognition is concrete on a neural level.

Schema

Superordinate knowledge structures that reflect abstracted commonalities across multiple experiences.

Anterior temporal lobe (ATL)

Amodal hub where different modalities of information converge. Main hub of semantic memory.