Ch. 9 Knowledge

hierarchies

A Social structure that organizes ranks people such as in a class system.

According to Collins and Quillian's model, which statement should you confirm the fastest?

A canary is a bird

cognitive economy

A feature of some semantic network models in which properties of a category that are shared by many members of a category are stored at a higher level node in the network. For example, the property "can fly" would be stored at the node for "bird" rather than at the node for "canary."

hub-and-spoke model

A model of semantic knowledge that proposes that areas of the brain that ( ATL AND IPL) are associated with different functions are connected to the anterior temporal lobe, which integrates information from these areas.

symbol grounding problem (Harnad, 1990)

A problem faced by any information processor that uses symbols to represent knowledge

lexical decision task

A procedure in which a person is asked to decide as quickly as possible whether a particular stimulus is a word or a nonword.

family resemblance

According to this view, all category members share at least one feature with another member of the category, but few features are shared between all members. In fact, it's possible that there isn't a single feature that is shared between all members!

reconstructive

Bartlett demonstrated that memory is _____. Instead of retrieving an exact copy of an event from memory, we rely on our past knowledge and experience to help us reconstruct memory the best we can.

Why are context effects a problem for the prototype view of categorization?

Because prototype theory doesn't explain how characteristic features can differ between contexts

Why is it a problem for the classical approach to categorization that people believe some category members are "better" exemplars than others?

Because, according to the classical approach, category membership is all-or-none

Poodle is to dogs, as _________is to _________.

Exemplar; category

commonsense knowledge problem (Lenat, 2019).

For example, all adults know that a single object can't be in two different places at the same time, effects occur after their causes, and if you own a backpack you also own its zipper Computers, on the other hand, don't implicitly know these things. Knowledge needs to be programmed into a computer.

Select all of the following that are problems for the theory that ATL is where semantic knowledge is localized in the brain

Healthy participants show a distributed pattern of activity during semantic memory tasks, similar brain areas are active when performing actions and reading action words, patients with category specific knowledge deficits have damage to atl

Rosch (1975) (Prototypical // Priming Stimulus)

Hearing the word green primes a highly prototypical green! Or a fruit primes a fruit

Which of the following is NOT a function of semantic knowledge

Helps us create meaningful connections to other people

Select all the examples of information that is stored in semantic memory

How old you are, the definition of semantic memory, knowing what a phone is used for, remembering what sound the letter "d" makes

defining features

If an exemplar possesses the required ___________, it belongs to that category; if it doesn't possess the necessary features, then it doesn't belong to the category

exemplars

Individual items in a category (such as the different chairs in the category 'chair')

According to the hub-and-spoke model, the anterior temporal lobe corresponds to the _________ component of the model.

Inferior parietal lobule

Which of the following is true of a prototype

It is a mental abstraction that doesn't have to be a real object It has the most family resemblance of all category members It has the largest number of characteristic features of all category members

Rips, Shoben & Smith (1973)

It turns out that we treat typical items differently than atypical ones. When asked to name category members, we start by naming typical members first (Rosch, 1975). We are faster to put typical members into categories than atypical ones (Rips, Shoben & Smith, 1973; Rosch 1973). Typical category members also show priming effects that atypical members do not (Rosch, Simpson, & Miller, 1976; Garrod & Sanford 1977)

psychological essentialism

The idea is that all category members possess a fundamental essence that is unique to that category and determines membership. Dogs are "doggy", birds are "birdy", and fruits are "fruity"

Which of the following is not an example of a schema?

Your knowledge of how to drive

concept

a mental representation of objects, ideas or events.

semantic dementia

a progressive neurodegenerative disease characterized by an inability to name objects, but importantly, this deficit is not primarily a language deficit or a perceptual deficit (Savage, et al., 2013). That is, patients are unable to name objects presented visually, verbally or by touch because they have a deficit with the knowledge itself, not with processing input from one of the senses.

Category

a set of items that are perceptually, biologically, or functionally similar

Schnall, Zadra, and Proffitt (2010) demonstrated that participants judged the incline of a hill as steeper if they had low energy (reduced blood glucose) compared to participants who did not have low energy. This is evidence to support _________.

a weak view of embodied cognition

"things to pack in a suitcase", "how to get an A", and "what to do if you find a bag full of money" are all examples of_________categories.

ad hoc

Probic et al. (2010) found naming speeds for non-living things were slowed when TMS was applied to:

all of the above

Ad Hoc Categories Barsalou (1993)

are an excellent example of the flexibility of categories. These categories are not necessarily stored in memory, but they come together as categories only as they relate to a specific goal: To what category do the following activities belong? -Move to the remote regions of Wyoming-Change your identity-Sail around the world-Go to Mexico

Superordinate categories

are distinctive, but not particularly informative. Animals are quite different from fruits, but knowing something is an animal provides relatively little information compared to knowing that it is a dog.

graceful degradation

because knowledge is stored as a pattern of activity across a large number of units, connectionist networks can withstand some loss of units with limited negative effects.

In what way does Collins' and Quillian's hierarchical model display cognitive economy?

by only storing properties once at the highest level possible in the heirarchy

classical view of categorization

categories are defined by sets of features that are both necessary and sufficient for category membership. For example, a grandmother is a mother whose child is a parent. These features are necessary for belonging to the grandmother category

spreading activation model

concepts are connected to each other based on semantic similarity. Activation spreads outward from a concept to connected nodes to activate semantically related concepts.

Murphy and Allopena (1994)

discovered that participants have difficulty learning about things that don't "make sense" such as a purple building in the desert inhabited by farmers traveling in submarines.

typicality effects

exemplars that are more average or normal for a given category are likely to be listed first when people are asked to name exemplars of that category, and are more rapidly verified as category members.

Characteristic features

features that are likely to belong to category members but are not required for category membership. For example, dogs are likely to have 4 legs, fur, and bark, but none of these things are required to belong to the dog category.

Category-specific deficits can be explained by which property of connection models?

graceful degradation

property inheritance

inferring a property is true of a given category because it is true of its superordinate category.

prototype

is the most typical member of the category, in other words, it is a member that would receive the highest typicality rating. Surprisingly, a ____ doesn't necessarily have to exist in reality; instead, it is an abstraction that has all of the characteristic features of a category.

Participants give consistent responses when asked to give typicality ratings to well-defined categories. This is a problem for prototype and examplar theory because:

it casts doubt on theory that categories have fuzzy borders

schemata

mental representations of how we expect the world to be

According to Barsalou, knowledge is stored by a pattern of activity in _________.

modality-specific neural activity

method of repeated reproduction

n order to investigate schemata and the role of knowledge on memory, Bartlett devised the ______. When asked to reproduce a stimulus from memory, people's reproductions get increasingly less detailed and begin to resemble familiar items over time

Imagine a patient who is unable to name pictures of everyday objects (such as scissors) but is able to demonstrate how to use them. Does this patient likely have semantic dementia?

no

In what way are connectionist models and semantic network models similar?

none of the above

Bartlett's research was influential because it demonstrated which of the following?

our memories are influenced by our previous knowledge and beliefs

Allen and Brook's (1991) experiments with "builders" and "diggers" provides evidence that

people learn about categories based on how similar category members are to each other

Rosch et al (1976)

prototype theory

The symbol grounding problem is not a problem for which of the following research approaches?

robotics

sentence verification task.

simple sentences are presented for the yes/no decisions

What category level is informative but not distinctive?

subordinate

Subordinate categories

such as German Shepard and Poodle, are informative because they provide a lot of information about the item; however, they are not distinctive because they share many features in common.

basic level categories

the most cognitively efficient. Basic level categories are the level in the hierarchy that seems to most of us to be "just right". That is, they provide just the right amount of information about the category to provide useful information (informative), and can be used to distinguish members from members of other categories (distinctive)

How are prototype theory and exemplar theory different from each other?

they differ in the number of items that are stored in memory

Collins and Loftus proposed a Spreading activation model of semantic knowledge because a hierarchical model couldn't explain _________, which had been demonstrated empirically.

typicality effects

Participants give _________when they rate whether exemplars are good examples of a category

typicality ratings

According to knowledge-based theories of categorization, we know an apple is a fruit because

we have an implicit understanding of what makes something a fruit

'black box'

while we can observe the responses of a neural network to a specific input, it is very difficult to determine why it made the response that it did because the information is represented in the values of distributed weights, not meaningful semantic units.