Psychology Essays

Psychology essays: Concepts

There have been various approaches to analysing the content and structure of concepts. One early content approach is the defining feature approach (originating from Aristotle) which states that concepts are represented by lists of properties or features (perceptual properties) which must apply to all category members and only to category members i.e. properties must be necessary and sufficient.

Defining features must also apply equally to all category members; it is thought that all concepts are represented in this way and that everyone represents concepts in the same way. This approach also proposes that relationships between concepts are in the form of a hierarchy, consisting of superordinate, intermediate and subordinate category levels. The superordinate level is the general, common, encapsulating parent category, the intermediate level is more specific and the subordinate level is the most specific.

As the superordinate category is the parent category, the lower level categories are exemplars (members) of the parent category. The intermediate and subordinate categories inherit the properties of the superordinate category and the subordinate categories inherit the properties of the intermediate categories.

Collins and Quillian (1969) proposed a conceptual hierarchy with defining features, consisting of the aforementioned category levels joined by nodes at which lists of defining features are attached. The parent superordinate category has a list of properties shared by the lower level categories. The lower level categories also list additional properties (the properties from the level above are not required to be listed).

In order to verify statements (saying whether they are true or false) the conceptual hierarchy needs to be searched to find the category an instance belongs to. Collins and Quillian argued that a search through two levels of a hierarchy would take longer than a one level search (the more levels need to be searched, the longer the search time). They used a sentence verification task with animal sentences which subjects had to gauge true or false.

The results showed that sentences needing two level searches did take longer to verify than one level searches (no level searches were quickest). There were exceptions to this rule, however: this was perhaps because the researchers failed to consider that people might have greater knowledge or be more familiar with certain words than others. In addition, some sentences that required a search through the same amount of levels still produced differences in verification times. Collins and Quillian suggested that the quicker times for same level searches occurred when the item to be verified was a more typical member of a category.

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