Ch. 9: General and Conceptual Knowledge

Conceptual knowledge

enables us to recognize objects and events and to make inferences ab properties.

What concepts allows us to do

understand individualcases

Supports efficient learning, communication, inference.

Provides stability to our perceptual world, platform for indirect learing, aid in creation of knew knowledge.

Definitional approach

determine category membership based on whether an object has the defining features associate with that category. Ex.) four legged, mammal, fur, tail.

Family resemblance

items in a category resemble one another in a # of ways rather than sharing one defining feature. Ex.) games can share rules, goals, competition, skill value w/o one feature being present everytime

Prototype Approach

average representation of the “typical” member of a category Ex.) 3 birds and a “prototype” bird that is an avg representation of the category “birds”.

Typicality effect

high prototypicality objects are processed preferentially (brain processes common examples quicker than unusual). Ex.) birds = robin instead of a penguin

Typicality effect works best for

abstract summary, large/stable categories, typicality effects, may lose details abt unusual

Exemplar approach

concept is represented by multiple examples instead of 1 abstract prototype. Ex.) rottweiler, dachshund, pit bull, greyhound instead of just a golden retriever representing dog (prototype)

Exemplar approach works best for

atypical cases, small/variable categories, many specific remembered instances

●Hierarchical Organization:

Superordinate (ANIMAL)

○ Basic (DOG) ■ (Basic → super = losing; Basic → sub = not gaining much) Subordinate (ROTTWEILER)

Human Conceptual Knowledge

Multimodal, casual beliefs/goals/social context, grounded in experience

large language models

learn statistical regularities from datasets, numerical representations