Chapter 5: Categorization and Discrimination

A collection of vocabulary flashcards based on the key concepts and definitions from the lecture on categorization and discrimination.

Categorizing

A cognitive act that involves sorting entities in the world.

Discrimination

The ability to distinguish percepts.

Category

A set of things or events that share at least one characteristic.

Concept

A mental representation that summarizes or tags percepts, categories, or relationships between them.

Associative agnosia

Inability to name objects, although able to describe features of objects.

Perceptual categories

Categories composed of perceptually similar items.

Perceptual similarity

The perceived overlap between two experiences.

Family resemblance

When things within a category are perceptually similar.

Naturalistic categories

Categories that include perceptually similar objects, which are typically harder to sort than less similar items.

Prototype

An idealized average that captures common qualities associated with many members of a category.

Exemplar

The most common version of a category member based on all experiences.

Typicality

A measure of how likely people are to note an item as falling within a specific category.

Lumpers vs. splitters

Lumpers focus on similarities, while splitters highlight distinct qualities.

Associative learning

When categorization can be explained as a process of associating percepts, actions, and outcomes.

Stimulus generalization

When responses to novel objects or events result from associative learning experiences with similar events.

Pseudocategories

When the same items are randomly assigned to different sets.

Fast mapping

Rapid increase in a child's ability to classify objects after learning the names of different objects.

Perceptual expertise

The ability to rapidly discriminate and recognize complex percepts.

Perceptual learning

Relatively long-lasting changes in your ability to discriminate percepts gained through experience.

Grandmother cells hypothesis

The proposal that there is a neuron that responds whenever you perceive or think about your grandmother.

Category-specific neurons

Neurons that respond selectively to items in a category.

Probabilistic categories

Items in different categories that are linked to specific outcomes, but not 100% of the time.

Complementary learning systems

The idea that the hippocampus is the fast system for storing exemplars while the cerebral cortex is the slow system for accumulating new concepts.

Distributed representations

When representations are spread out across many separate neurons.

Connectionist models

Models that simulate the formation and application of distributed representations of categories and concepts within the cerebral cortex.