cognitive psychology connecting mind, research and everyday experience with coglab manual，3rd edition 部分2

1、238 238 Our ability to categorize some of these animals as “cats” and some as “dogs” helps us know which ones are more likely to fetch a thrown ball and which ones might rub up against a person’ s leg while purring.

2、Research on how people place objects into categories such as “cat” or “dog”—and also more specifically, “Siamese” or “beagle”—is important for understanding how knowledge about the world is represented in the mind.Knowle

3、dge33559_09_ch09_p238-267.indd 238 13/04/10 5:59 PMCopyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.240 ? C H A P T E R 9 K now l e d g e Why is

4、 it difficul t to decide if a particul ar obj ect bel ongs to a particul ar category, such as “chair,” by l ooking up its definition? (241)How are the properties of various obj ects “fil ed away” in the mind? (24

5、3, 256)How is information about different categories stored in the brain? (260)Can young infants respond to the categories “cat” and “dog”? (263)Some Questions We Will ConsiderImagine that you find yourself in an unf

6、amiliar town, where you have never been before. As you walk down the street, you notice that many things are not exactly the same as what you would encounter if you were in your own town. On the other hand, there are

7、lots of things that seem familiar. Cars pass by, there are buildings on either side of the street and a gas station on the corner, and a cat dashes across the street and makes it safely to the other side. Luckily, you

8、know a lot about cars, build- ings, gas stations, and cats, so you have no trouble understanding what is going on. You know about the various components of this street scene because your mind is full of concepts. A conc

9、ept is a mental representation that is used for a variety of cog- nitive functions, including memory, reasoning, and using and understanding language (Solomon et al., 1999). Thus, when you think about cats, you are draw

10、ing on your concept, or mental representation, of cats, which includes information about what cats are, what they usually look like, how they behave, and so on. By far the most commonly studied function of concepts is

11、categorization, which is the process by which things are placed into groups called categories. For example, when you see vehicles in the street you can place them into categories such as cars, SUVs, Chevrolets, Fords,

12、 American cars, and foreign cars. Categories are not simply conve- nient ways of sorting objects. They are tools that are essential for our understanding of the world. One of the most important functions of categories i

13、s to help us to understand individ- ual cases we have never seen before. For example, being able to say that the furry animal across the street is a “cat” provides a great deal of information about it (● Figure 9.1). C

14、ategories have therefore been called “pointers to knowledge” (Yamauchi Spalding & Murphy, 1996). Being able to place things in categories can also help us understand behaviors that we might otherwise find baffling

15、. For example, if we see a man with the left side of his face painted black and the right side painted gold, we might wonder what is going on. However, once we note that the person is heading toward the football stadi

16、um and it is Sunday afternoon, we can categorize the person as a “Pittsburgh Steelers fan.” Placing him in that category explains his painted face and perhaps other strange behaviors that happen to be normal on game da

17、y in Pittsburgh (Solomon et al., 1999). These various uses of categories testify to their importance in everyday life. It is no exaggeration to say that if there were no such thing as categories, we would have a very

18、difficult time dealing with the world. Consider what it would mean if every time you saw a different object, you knew nothing about it other than what you could find out by investigating it individually. Clearly, life

19、would become extremely complicated if we weren’ t able to rely on the knowledge provided to us by categories. Given the importance of categories, cognitive psychologists have been interested in determining the process