Cognitive Psychology CH 9

When a participant is asked to list examples of the category vegetables, it is most likely that

a carrot would be named before eggplant.

In a lexical decision task, participants have to decide whether

a letter string is a word.

The process of back propagation is most closely associated with

connectionist networks.

Items high on prototypicality have ____ family resemblances.

strong

Which of the following is an example of the sentence verification technique?

Indicate whether the following statement is true: An apple is a fruit. YES NO

At what age do infants begin forming basic level categories?

3-4 months

In evaluating retrieval rates for category information for a concept, Collins and Quillian's semantic network approach would predict the slowest reaction times for which of the following statements using a sentence verification technique?

A field sparrow is an animal.

According to Collins and Quillian's semantic network model, it should take longest to verify which statement below?

A pig is an animal.

______ is an average representation of a category.

A prototype

Which of the following is NOT a property of the connectionist approach?

Before any learning has occurred in the network, the weights in the network all equal zero.

Which term below is most closely associated with semantic networks?

Cognitive economy

Which of the following is most closely modeled on the way the nervous system operates?

Parallel distributed processing theory

Which approach to categorization involves forming a representation based on an average of category members that a person has encountered in the past?

Prototype

Which of the following members would most likely be ranked highest in prototypicality in the "birds" category?

Sparrow

People playing the parlor game "20 Questions" often use hierarchical organization strategies. One player asks up to 20 yes/no questions to determine the identity of an object another player has selected. The player's questions usually start as general and get more specific as the player approaches a likely guess. Initial questions asked by a player are often one of three questions: "Is it an animal?" "Is it a vegetable?" and "Is it a mineral?" Each of these three questions describes which level of categorization?

Superordinate

Which of the following would be in a basic level category?

Truck

The activity that represents a particular object is established in a connectionist network through a process of learning that involves

adjusting the weights of inhibitory and excitatory connections between units.

Learning takes place in a connectionist network through a process of _____ in which an error signal is transmitted from output units towards the input units.

back propagation

According to Rosch, the ____ level of categories is the psychologically "privileged" level of category that reflects people's everyday experience.

basic

Your text describes cross-cultural studies of categorization with U.S. and Itza participants. Given the results of these studies, we know that if asked to name basic level objects for a catego-ry, U.S. participants would answer ____ and Itza participants would answer ____.

bird; sparrow

How is cognitive economy represented in the following example? The property _____ is stored at the _____ node.

can fly; bird

The prototype approach to categorization states that a standard representation of a category is based on

category members that have been encountered in the past.

A(n) ____ is a mental representation used for a variety of cognitive functions, including memory, reasoning, and using and understanding language.

concept

Connectionist networks are modeled after neural networks in the nervous system and incorporate all of the following features of the nervous system EXCEPT

concepts represented by activity in individual nodes.

One beneficial property of connectionist networks is graceful degradation, which refers to the property that

damage to the system does not completely disrupt its operation.

If a system has the property of graceful degradation, this means that

damage to the system doesn't completely disrupt its operation.

Not all of the members of everyday categories have the same features. Most fish have gills, fins, and scales. Sharks lack the feature of scales, yet they are still categorized as fish. This poses a problem for the _______ approach to categorization.

definitional

Research on the physiology of semantic memory has shown that the representation of different categories in the brain (like living and non-living things) is best described as being

distributed.

The definitional approach to categorization

doesn't work well for most natural objects like birds, trees, and plants.

If you say that "a Labrador retriever is my idea of a typical dog," you would be using the _____ approach to categorization.

exemplar

Research suggests that the _____ approach to categorization works best for small categories (e.g., U.S. presidents).

exemplar

Priming occurs when presentation of one stimulus

facilitates the response to another stimulus.

The principle illustrated when most people are able to recognize a variety of examples of chairs even though no one category member may have all of the characteristic properties of "chairs" (e.g., most chairs have four legs but not all do) is

family resemblance.

Imagine that a young child is just learning about the category "dog." Thus far, she has expe-rienced only two dogs, one a small poodle and the other a large German shepherd. On her third encounter with a dog, she will be LEAST likely to correctly categorize the animal as a dog if that animal

is a dog that does not bark.

Collins and Loftus modified the original semantic network theory of Collins and Quillian to satisfy some of the criticisms of the original model. However, their revised model was not im-mune to criticism. One criticism of Collins and Loftus' semantic network theory is that it

is of little explanatory value because it can explain just about any result.

According to the typicality effect,

items that are high in prototypicality are judged more rapidly as being in a group.

Olin and Bob are neighbors. Olin loves birds and his father works for the zoo. He has been to a dozen bird sanctuaries, and he and his dad go on bird watching hikes once a month. In contrast, Bob doesn't think much about birds. His only contact with them is in his backyard. It would be correct to say that Olin's standard probably involves

more exemplars than Bob's.

In the semantic network model, a specific category is represented at a

node.

Spreading activation

primes associated concepts.

Rosch found that participants respond more rapidly in a same-different task when presented with "good" examples of colors such as "red" and "green" than when they are presented with "poor" examples such as "pink" or "light green." The result of this experiment was interpreted as supporting the _____ approach to categorization.

prototype

The _____ model includes associations between concepts and the property of spreading acti-vation.

semantic network

Collins and Quillian explained the results of priming experiments by introducing the concept of _____ into their network model.

spreading activation

If we were conducting an experiment on the effect knowledge has on categorization, we might compare the results of expert and non-expert groups. Suppose we compare horticulturalists to people with little knowledge about plants. If we asked the groups to name, as specifically as possible, five different plants seen around campus, we would predict that the expert group would primarily label plants on the _____ level, while the non-expert group would primarily label plants on the _____ level.

subordinate; basic

According to the text, jumping from _______ categories results in the largest gain in information.

superordinate level to basic level

The connectionist network has learned the correct pattern for a concept when

the back propagated error signal is zero.

The semantic network model predicts that the time it takes for a person to retrieve information about a concept should be determined by

the distance that must be traveled through the network.

Rosch and coworkers conducted an experiment in which participants were shown a category label, like car or vehicle, and then, after a brief delay, saw a picture. The participants' task was to indicate as rapidly as possible whether the picture was a member of the category. Their results showed

the priming effect was most robust for basic level categories.

Collins and Quillian's semantic network model predicts that the reaction time to verify "a canary is a bird" is _____ the reaction time to verify "an ostrich is a bird."

the same as

For the category "fruit," people give a higher typicality rating to "banana" than to "kiwi." Knowing that, we can also reason that

the word "fruit" will lead to a larger priming effect for banana than for kiwi.

Good psychological theories must have all of the following properties EXCEPT being

too powerful to be refuted by empirical evidence.

Collins and Loftus modified the original semantic network theory of Collins and Quillian to satisfy some of the criticisms of the original model. In their modification, Collins and Loftus ac-count for the typicality effect by

using shorter links to connect more closely related concepts.

Learning in the connectionist network is represented by adjustments to network

weights

Which of the following statements is NOT cited in your text as a reason why categories are useful?

Categories provide definitions of groups of related objects.

Which approach to categorization can more easily take into account atypical cases such as flightless birds?

Exemplar

_______ are actual members of a category that a person has encountered in the past.

Exemplars

An advantage of the prototype approach over the exemplar approach is that the prototype ap-proach provides a better explanation of the typicality effect.

False

Collins and Loftus modified the original semantic network theory of Collins and Quillian to satisfy some of the criticisms of the original model. People consider this to be a strong theory because it is powerful enough to explain just about any result.

False

Connectionist theory states that a particular object (like a canary) is identified by activity in the specific "canary" output unit of the network.

False

Which methodology is used to study categorization processes in very young infants?

Familiarization/novelty preference procedure

Which of the following is NOT associated with the semantic network model?

Family resemblance

Which of the following represents a basic level item?

Guitar

A task for determining how prototypical an object is would be

a task where participants rate the extent to which each member represents the category title.

One of the key properties of the _____ approach is that a specific concept is represented by activity that is distributed over many units in the network.

connectionist