Concepts and Category

1. Concept

1.1. An idea about something that provides a means of understanding the world.

2. Connection between Concept and Category

2.1. Central to how humans represent knowledge about the world.

2.2. A basic crucial process that allows us to organize our experience of the world.

3. Categorization Approaches

3.1. The Exemplar Approach - Every instance of a category stored in memory and it is based on our experiences that developed through childhood and beyond.

3.2. The Feature Approach - Form categories by specifying characteristics (features) of a category that are both necessary and sufficient for membership in that category.

3.3. The Prototype Approach - A representation formed of 'average' values for features characterizing the entity.

4. Categories

4.1. A set of objects that 'belong' together.

5. Mechanism Formation

5.1. Sensory Input

5.2. Abstraction

6. Category Loss?

6.1. Difficulty in recognizing and describing something which used to be recognizable and describable.

6.2. Due to injury to a particular part of the brain resulting in loss of categorization ability.

6.3. i.e: Agnosia - can perceive objects within the category they have lost but can't identify them.

6.4. Prosopagnosia - loss of ability to categorize or recognize faces.