PSYC 410 1st Edition Exam #3 Study Guide Lectures: 9-13Chapter 9: Knowledge- Chapter Reviewo Categories are “pointers to knowledge.” Once you know that something is in a category, you know a lot of general things about it and focus your energy on specifying what is special about it.o The definitional approach to categorization doesn’t work because most categories contain members that do not confirm to the definition. The philosopher Wittgenstein proposed the idea of family resemblances to deal with the fact that definitions do not include all members of a categoryo The idea behind the prototypical approach to categorization is that we decide whether an object belongs to a category by deciding whether is similar to a standard representative of the category, called a prototype. A prototype is formed by averaging category members a personhas encountered in the pasto Prototypically is a term used to describe how well and object resembles the prototype of a particular categoryo The following is true of high-prototypical objects: (a) they have high family resemblance; (b) statements about them are verified rapidly; (c) they are named first; and (d) they are affected more priming.o The exemplar approach to categorization involves determining whether an object is similar to an exemplar. An exemplar is and actual member of a category that a person has encountered in the pasto An advantage of the exemplar approach is that it doesn’t discard information about atypical cases within a category, such as penguin in the bird category. The exemplar approach can also deal more easily with categories that contain widely varying members, like games.o Researchers have concluded that people used both approaches to categorization. Prototypes may be more important as people initially learn about categories’ later exemplar information may become more important. Exemplars may work better for small categories (U.S. presidents), and prototypes may work better for larger categories (birds).o The kind of organization in which larger, more general categories are divided into smaller, more specific categories is called hierarchical organization. o Experiments by Rosch indicate that a basic level of categories (such as guitar, as opposed to musical instrument or rock guitar) is a “privileged” level of categorization that reflects people’s everyday experience.o Experiments in which experts were tested show that the basic level categorization can depend on a person’s degree of expertise.o The semantic networkapproach proposes that concepts are arranges in networks that represent the way concepts are organized in the mind. Collings and Quillian’smodel is a network that consists of nodes connected by links. Concepts and properties of concepts are located at the nodes. Properties that hold for most members of a concept are stored at higher level nodes. This is called cognitive economy.o Collins and Quillian’s model is supported by the results of experiments using the sentence verification technique. The spreading activation feature pf the model is supported by priming experimentso The Collins and Quillian model has been criticized for several reasons: it can’t explain the typicality effect, the idea if cognitive economy doesn’t always hold, and it can’t explain all results of sentence verification experiments.o Collins and Loftus proposed another semantic network model. Designed to deal with criticisms of the Collins and Quillian model. This model was, in turn, criticized because it was so flexible that it could explain any result.o The connectionist approach proposes that concepts are represented in networks that consist of input units, hidden units, and output units. Information about concepts is represented in these networks by distributed activation of those units. This approach is therefore also called the parallel distribution processing (PDP)approach.o Connectionist networks learn to correct distributed pattern for a particular conceptthrough a gradual learning process that involves adjusting the weights that determine how activation is transmitted from one unit to anothero Connectionist networks have a number of features that enable them to reduce many aspects of human concept formationo The idea that concepts are represented by specialized brain areas has been supported by single neuron recording (Freeman’s monkey experiments), neuropsychological evidence (category-specific knowledge impairments), and by the results of brain scanning experiments in humans (animals versus tools). The conclusion from this evidence is that knowledge about concepts is distributed over many areas of the brain.o Newborn infants are capable of crude categorization. The familiarity/novelty preference procedure has been used to determine the development of categorization from global to basic specific between 2 and 7 months of age. Further learning childhood adds more specific knowledge to categories.Chapter 10: Visual Imagery- Chapter Reviewo Mental imagery is experiencing a sensory impression in the absence of sensory input. Visual imagery is “seeing” in the absence of a visual stimulus.o Early ideas about imagery included the imageless thought debate and Galton’s work with visual imagery, but imagery research stopped during the behaviorist era. o Kosslyn’s mental scanning experiments suggested that imagery shares the same mechanism as perception, but these results and others were challenged by Pylyshn, who stated that imagery is based on a mechanism related to language.o One pf Pylyshn arguments against the idea of a depictive representation us the tacit knowledge explanation, which states that when asked to imagine something, people ask themselves what is would look like to see it and stimulate this staged event.o Finke and Pinker’s “flashed dot” experiment argued against the tacit knowledge explanation. The following experiments also demonstrated parallels between imagery and perception; (a) size in the visual field; (b) interaction between perception and imagery; and (c) physiological experiments.o Parallels between perception and imagery have been demonstrated physiological by the following methods: (a) recording from single neurons; (b) brain imagery; (c) transcranial magnetic stimulation experiments; and (d) neuropsychological case studies.o There is also physiological evidence