Download PSYCH 207: Cognitive Processes - Lecture Notes

• Family resemblance is another area where the prototype view shines. Family members
look similar but they don’t all have one characteristic that is exactly the same. Some
family members share some characteristics of some other family members, but those
characteristics aren’t shared among all family members.
• Overlapping features between members of a category predict typicality.
• Example: fruits.
– Apple: red, sweet, crunchy, round.
– Orange: juicy, sweet, round, soft.
– Coconut: hard, brown, white inside, tropical.
• Example: furniture.
– Chair: sit on, legs, armrests, upholstery.
– Sofa: cushions, sit on, upholstery, armrests.
– Rug: stand on, woven, soft, flat.
• The prototypicality of a category member predicts the performance on a number of
tasks.
• For instance, if you were asked to identify if a given concept is included in a category
(“is X a fruit?”), you would perform worse on less typical members. You’d respond
slower to “is tomato a fruit?” than “is apple a fruit?”.
• Concepts will still have features in common with other categories as well, just less
features in common than the main category it’s considered to be part of.
8.4.1
Problems with the Prototype View
• Categories are variable. The concept of a “game” may differ depending on you – it
may mean paintball, online poker, or basketball, for instance.
• Typicality is not fixed. Typicality varies as a function of the context it’s in. A robin
may seem typical in the context of a park and less typical in the context of a farm or
backyard.
8.5
The Exemplar View
• Concepts are composed of previous instances (examples).
• Categorization occurs by comparing the current instance with previous instances that
are stored in memory.
• There are no fuzzy prototypes being stored in memory under this view.
• This view has gained much traction lately. It’s widely supported in literature.
• This view shows that in many cases we’re interested in superficial similarity, and not
actually digging for similar meaning.
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