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A concept is an abstract idea that serves as a foundation for more concrete principles, thoughts, and beliefs. Concepts play an important role in all aspects of cognition. As such, concepts are studied within such disciplines as linguistics, psychology, and philosophy, and these disciplines are interested in the logical and psychological structure of concepts, and how they are put together to form thoughts and sentences. The study of concepts has served as an important flagship of an emerging interdisciplinary approach, cognitive science.
Categorization is a type of cognition involving conceptual differentiation between characteristics of conscious experience, such as objects, events, or ideas. It involves the abstraction and differentiation of aspects of experience by sorting and distinguishing between groupings, through classification or typification on the basis of traits, features, similarities or other criteria that are universal to the group. Categorization is considered one of the most fundamental cognitive abilities, and it is studied particularly by psychology and cognitive linguistics.
In philosophy of mind and cognitive science, folk psychology, or commonsense psychology, is a human capacity to explain and predict the behavior and mental state of other people. Processes and items encountered in daily life such as pain, pleasure, excitement, and anxiety use common linguistic terms as opposed to technical or scientific jargon. Folk psychology allows for an insight into social interactions and communication, thus stretching the importance of connection and how it is experienced.
George Armitage Miller was an American psychologist who was one of the founders of cognitive psychology, and more broadly, of cognitive science. He also contributed to the birth of psycholinguistics. Miller wrote several books and directed the development of WordNet, an online word-linkage database usable by computer programs. He authored the paper, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two," in which he observed that many different experimental findings considered together reveal the presence of an average limit of seven for human short-term memory capacity. This paper is frequently cited by psychologists and in the wider culture. Miller won numerous awards, including the National Medal of Science.
Prototype theory is a theory of categorization in cognitive science, particularly in psychology and cognitive linguistics, in which there is a graded degree of belonging to a conceptual category, and some members are more central than others. It emerged in 1971 with the work of psychologist Eleanor Rosch, and it has been described as a "Copernican Revolution" in the theory of categorization for its departure from the traditional Aristotelian categories. It has been criticized by those that still endorse the traditional theory of categories, like linguist Eugenio Coseriu and other proponents of the structural semantics paradigm.
Eleanor Rosch is an American psychologist. She is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in cognitive psychology and primarily known for her work on categorization, in particular her prototype theory, which has profoundly influenced the field of cognitive psychology.
Dedre Dariel Gentner is an American cognitive and developmental psychologist. She is the Alice Gabriel Twight Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University, and a leading researcher in the study of analogical reasoning.
Linda B. Smith is an American developmental psychologist internationally recognized for her theoretical and empirical contributions to developmental psychology and cognitive science, proposing, through theoretical and empirical studies, a new way of understanding developmental processes. Smith's works are groundbreaking and illuminating for the field of perception, action, language, and categorization, showing the unique flexibility found in human behavior. She has shown how perception and action are ways of obtaining knowledge for cognitive development and word learning.
Claude Mason Steele is a social psychologist and emeritus professor at Stanford University, where he is the I. James Quillen Endowed Dean, Emeritus at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education, and Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences, Emeritus.
Michael I. Posner is an American psychologist who is a researcher in the field of attention, and the editor of numerous cognitive and neuroscience compilations. He is emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, and an adjunct professor at the Weill Medical College in New York. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Posner as the 56th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Neal Elgar Miller was an American experimental psychologist. Described as an energetic man with a variety of interests, including physics, biology and writing, Miller entered the field of psychology to pursue these. With a background training in the sciences, he was inspired by professors and leading psychologists at the time to work on various areas in behavioral psychology and physiological psychology, specifically, relating visceral responses to behavior.
Concept learning, also known as category learning, concept attainment, and concept formation, is defined by Bruner, Goodnow, & Austin (1956) as "the search for and testing of attributes that can be used to distinguish exemplars from non exemplars of various categories". More simply put, concepts are the mental categories that help us classify objects, events, or ideas, building on the understanding that each object, event, or idea has a set of common relevant features. Thus, concept learning is a strategy which requires a learner to compare and contrast groups or categories that contain concept-relevant features with groups or categories that do not contain concept-relevant features.
The theory of constructed emotion is a theory in affective science proposed by Lisa Feldman Barrett to explain the experience and perception of emotion. The theory posits that instances of emotion are constructed predictively by the brain in the moment as needed. It draws from social construction, psychological construction, and neuroconstruction.
William Kaye Estes was an American psychologist. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Estes as the 77th most cited psychologist of the 20th century. In order to develop a statistical explanation for the learning phenomena, William Kaye Estes developed the Stimulus Sampling Theory in 1950 which suggested that a stimulus-response association is learned on a single trial; however, the learning process is continuous and consists of the accumulation of distinct stimulus-response pairings.
Susan E. Carey is an American psychologist who is a professor of psychology at Harvard University. She studies language acquisition, children's development of concepts, conceptual changes over time, and the importance of executive functions. She has conducted experiments on infants, toddlers, adults, and non-human primates. Her books include Conceptual Change in Childhood (1985) and The Origin of Concepts (2009).
Sandra Robin Waxman is an American cognitive and developmental psychologist. She is a Louis W. Menk Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and director of the university's Infant and Child Development Center. She is known for her work on the development of language and concepts in infants and children.
Exemplar theory is a proposal concerning the way humans categorize objects and ideas in psychology. It argues that individuals make category judgments by comparing new stimuli with instances already stored in memory. The instance stored in memory is the "exemplar". The new stimulus is assigned to a category based on the greatest number of similarities it holds with exemplars in that category. For example, the model proposes that people create the "bird" category by maintaining in their memory a collection of all the birds they have experienced: sparrows, robins, ostriches, penguins, etc. If a new stimulus is similar enough to some of these stored bird examples, the person categorizes the stimulus in the "bird" category. Various versions of the exemplar theory have led to a simplification of thought concerning concept learning, because they suggest that people use already-encountered memories to determine categorization, rather than creating an additional abstract summary of representations.
Robert Mark Nosofsky is an American psychologist. He is a professor in the department of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University Bloomington, who is known for his exemplar theory. His research interest are categorization, recognition memory, math modeling, combining formal modeling and FMRI Studies. His research is in the development and testing of formal mathematical models of perceptual category learning and representation.
Lance Jeffrey Rips is an American psychologist and professor in the Department of Psychology at Northwestern University. Before joining Northwestern in 1994, he taught at the University of Chicago for nineteen years. His research has focused on human memory and deductive reasoning, among other topics. He received a Fulbright Fellowship in 2004 and 2005, and he was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2008. In addition, he is a fellow of the Cognitive Science Society, American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Society of Experimental Psychologists.
John Kendall Kruschke is an American psychologist and statistician known for his work in connectionist models of human learning, and in Bayesian statistical analysis. He is Provost Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington. He won the Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences in 2002.
References
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- 1 2 "Douglas (Doug) Medin Faculty Profile". Northwestern University. Retrieved 25 January 2024.
- 1 2 3 4 "Douglas L. Medin Curriculum Vitae" (PDF). Northwestern University. Retrieved 26 September 2015.
- ↑ "Douglas L. Medin". Association for Psychological Science. 30 April 2013. Retrieved 26 September 2015.
- ↑ Medin, Douglas L.; Schaffer, Marguerite M. (1978). "Context theory of classification learning". Psychological Review. 85 (3): 207–238.
- ↑ Murphy, Gregory L.; Medin, Douglas L. (1985). "Teh roled of theories in conceptual coherence". Psychological Review. 92 (3): 289–316.
- ↑ "Kanwisher, Medin Elected to National Academy of Sciences". Psychological Science Agenda. May 2005. Retrieved 27 September 2015.
- ↑ Medin, Douglas L.; Atran, Scott (2004). "The Native Mind: Biological Categorization and Reasoning in Development and Across Cultures". Psychological Review. 111 (4): 960–983.
