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Week 07_Concept Formation

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Week 07_Concept Formation

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lilyblair220103
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Concepts and

Categories: Let me
Organize….
Naveen Kashyap, PhD
Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati
Email: [email protected]
What do humans process by cognitive processes?
In general, cognitive psychologists believe that humans form
mental representations and it is these that are processed
by cognitive processes. Thus all knowledge in humans are
stored as mental representations, and they in turn guide
our behavior. Mental representation are stored as concepts
& categories.
What is a concept?
A concept is a mental representation of some object, event,
or pattern that stores in it much of the knowledge typically
thought relevant to that object, event or pattern.

e.g., dog (concept) = animal, 4 legs & tail, man’s best friend
(knowledge)
What is a category?
A category can be defined as a class of similar things
(objects/entities) that share one or two things: either an
essential core (e.g., why all sciences courses are
considered “science”) or some similarity in perceptual,
biological, or functional properties
Nature of Concepts
The Classical View
It dates back to Aristotle and dominated psychology till
1970’s. This view believe that all examples/instances of
concept share fundamental characteristics/ features. In
particular the classical view of concepts holds that the
features represented are individually necessary and
collectively sufficient (Medin, 1989).
Implications of classical view
-It assumes that concepts mentally represent lists of
features

- It assumes membership in a category is clear cut

- It implies that all members within a category are created


equal
Critics of classical view
-Rosch found that people judge different members of a
category differently

-The idea that people store and refer to a list of necessary


features when judging category membership is doubtful

-Most people cannot generate lists of features that are


individually necessary and collectively sufficient to specify
membership in a category
The Prototype View
Like perceptual researchers, conceptual researches believe in
the existence of mental prototypes, - idealized
representations of some class of objects or events.

Prototypes of concepts are features or aspects that are


characteristics – that is typical - of members of the
category rather than necessary and sufficient.
No individual feature or aspect need be present in the
instance for it to count as a member of the category, but the
more characteristic features or aspect an instance has, the
more likely it is to be regarded as a member of the category.

-The prototype view of category and concepts refers to the


family resemblance structure of concepts, a structure in
which each member has a number of features, sharing
different features with different members.
-A prototype is some sort of abstraction that include all the
characteristics of a category and may/may not be actual
instance of category. Prototypes are often thought of as
mental “summaries” or “averages” of all the instances.

-Concepts exists at many different level of a hierarchy but one


level of abstraction appears psychologically fundamental.
This is the “basic level” and different from both higher level
(super-ordinate) and lower level (sub-ordinate) concepts.
Critics of Prototype View
-It fails to capture people’s knowledge about the limits of
conceptual boundaries.

- A second problem from the prototype view has to do with


typicality ratings
The Exemplar View
concepts include representations of at least some actual
individual instances

categorize new instances by comparing to representations of


previously stored instances, called exemplars.

difficulty categorizing unclear, atypical instances because


such instances are similar to exemplars of different
categories
Critics of Exemplar View

- like prototype view it is too unconstrained and fails to


specify which instances will eventually be stored as
exemplars

- how different exemplars are “called to mind” at the time


of categorization.
The Schemata View
This view shares features with both the prototype view (in
that both schemata and prototypes store information that is
abstracted across instances) and the exemplar view (both
schemata and exemplar store information about actual
instances).
Critics of schemata view
-It does not specify clear enough boundaries among
individual schemata

- The schemata framework, in the present view, is not


sufficiently delineated to be empirically testable

- Also question like what information leads to schemata and


how are they modified plus the process of using appropriate
schemata is not known.
The Knowledge Based View

The idea of knowledge-based view is that a person classifying


objects and events doesn’t just compare features or
physical aspects of the objects and events to features or
aspects of stored representations. Instead, the person
uses his/her knowledge of how the concept is organized,
to justify the classification and to explain why certain
instances happen to go together in the same category.
Most previous views of concepts fail to answer satisfactorily
how things in the same category go together. The
knowledge based view proposed that people’s theories or
mental explanations about the world are intertwined with
their concepts and provide the basis for categorization

The Five approaches to conceptual structure has been


categorized into two subtypes (Komatsu, 1992).
Similarity based category
- The similarity based category consists of classical,
prototype, exemplar & parts of schemata views.

- It includes approaches in which categorization is assumed


to be based on the similarity of an instance to some abstract
specification of the category

- The key critic of this view is that similarity is meaningful only


in certain respects
Explanation based category
- Comprises of the schemata view and knowledge based view.

- People using this view base classification on meaningful


relationships among instances and categories.
Forming New Concepts and Classifying New Instances

Concept formation requires some basis of generalization, for


grouping certain things but not others together. This process
requires figuring out what features are relevant / irrelevant
with little feedback.
Concept Attainment Strategies
The process of acquiring concepts involve – acquiring the
information necessary to isolate and learn a concept, retaining
the information for later use and transforming the information to
make it usable when testing ideas about new possible instances.
The possible strategies for concept formation involve
- Simultaneous Scanning

- Successive Scanning

- Conservative Focusing
Bruner et.al. (1956) found that the effectiveness of each of
their strategies depend to some extent on the task conditions

Acquiring Prototypes
- People do form and use prototypes, even when given
distorted instances during the learning

- Learning about category variability may be at-least as


important as learning about prototypes, especially if
categorizations are to be made later for new instances that
vary a great deal from the prototype
Implicit Concept Learning
Brooks (1978) defined Non analytical concept formation (in
contrast to logical, scientific and focused), also called Implicit
Learning, require that people pay attention to individual
exemplars, storing information about the representations of
them in memory. Later classifications are done by comparing
new instances to the representations, drawing analogies
between new and old.

Brooks describes five factors that encourage people to store


information about individual exemplars
- The first factor involves task requirements to learn information
that distinguishes among individual instances

- A second factor involves the original learning situation

- Third, some stimuli lend themselves to hypothesis testing


better than others

- A fourth factor is that in real-life concept learning, instances


may belong to a number of categories all at the same time.

- Fifth, in natural settings we learn about instances without


knowing how we will be called on to use the information later.

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