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LU2 Q&A
Cognitive Psychology: The Cognitive Science Approach
Why are concepts and categories important?
A concept is an idea of an entity through mental representation, whereas a category is a set of objects that appear to belong together to produce coherence. Murphy (2022) stated that concepts are actually very prevalent in our world, and that we think of the future and past events in categories. Hence, concepts and categories are two fundamental ideas in helping humans perceive the environment around them in order to provide an understanding of the world. When we understand the concept of something and are able to categorise them in many different approaches, it will be easy for us to make sense of the world systematically.
What are some of the problems in the "exemplar approach" of categorization?
The exemplar approach is used to categorise an entity based on its features and relate it to the experience of similar things that we have encountered in the past. However, the exemplar approach may not be a sufficient way of approach in categorising certain things. According to Sobel and Li (2013), most objects may not have similar features to others despite being assigned into the same category. They argued that different people have different opinions when it comes to assigning entities to a category, therefore not everyone would be able to group an object the same way as the majority. Sobel and Li also stated that cultural differences also affect the categorization of things based on the exemplar approach. As an exemplification, Sobel asks her group of students to list out features belonging to the word ‘brother’. She found that students of the modern day did not use ‘having the same parents’ to categorise ‘brother’, as they have stepparents, and therefore, stepbrothers from different parents, much different than Sobel’s day of having an intact married family in that time period.
How does the usage of mnemonic devices help in retaining information from memory?
Mnemonic devices are a type of skill used in memorising usually in the form of pictures or a sentence, where the information recorded will be transferred to the long-term memory (LTM). Caplan and Stern (2008) declared that the cognitive load used up in gaining any information is lessened with the use of mnemonics, hence the capability of memory encoding will rise and in turn affect the facilitation of the LTM.