PSYC331 Final Exam with Complete Answers

PSYC331 Final Exam - Knowledge, Language, Problem solving, and Judgement, decisions, reasoning What is the difference between a category, concept, and prototype? (Unit 9) Answer- Concept: a mental representation of an individual or class. Example: the way a person mentally represents "cat" or "house" Category: concepts are organized into categories. The set of all examples of a particular concept. Example: every type and breed of dog that a person has encountered. Prototype: a "standard" member of a category constructed as the average representation of the category. Example: bird prototypes are likely to all have wings and a beak. What is a problem with the "definitional approach to categorization? (Unit 9) Answer- Definitional approach to categorization: item is placed into a category depending on whether it meets the definition of that category. Problem: This approach does not work well for most natural objects (birds, trees, plants) and many human-made objects (chairs) because there could be many different definitions for what a "chair" is. Example: if a chair is defined as having 4 legs, then a table could also be considered a chair by this definition. But a bean bag, which is a type of chair, would not. What is "spreading activation" and what is a popular task used in cognitive psychology that provides evidence of spreading activation? (Unit 9) Answer- Spreading activation: The idea that activity spreads out along any link in a semantic network that is connected to an activated node. Example: concept "plant" is activated, activity spreads along links to other connected concepts like "living", "tree", "flower". Lexical decision task: when a participant is asked to decide as quickly as possible if a group of letters is a word (book) or non-word (wame). This is evidence for spreading activation because participants respond significantly faster to a target word when the previous target is semantically related to the current target (semantic priming) Example: they will recognize the word "cat" faster when the previous word was "dog" than if the previous word was "cup". What are some criticisms of the "embodied approach of categorization?" (Unit 9) Answer- Embodied approach of categorization: our knowledge of concepts is based on reactivation of