Cognitive Psychology and Education
Learning New Concepts
In your studies, you encounter many new terms, and they’re often accompanied by definitions. In many textbooks, for example, you’ll find , introducing new concepts, and often the book provides a helpful definition, perhaps in the page’s margin. As the chapter argues, though, this mode of presentation doesn’t line up all that well with the structure of human knowledge. The reason, in brief, is that you don’t have (or need) a definition for most of the concepts in your repertoire; in fact, a definition may not even exist. And even when you do know a definition, your use of the concept often relies on other information—including a prototype for that term, as well as a set of exemplars. In addition, your use of conceptual information routinely depends on a broader fabric of knowledge, linking this concept to other things you know. This broader knowledge encompasses what the text calls your “theory” about that concept, a theory that (among other things) explains why the concept’s attributes are as they are.
You use your theory about a concept in many ways. For example, we’ve argued that whenever you rely on a prototype, you’re drawing conclusions based on the resemblance between the prototype and the new case you’re thinking about, and resemblance depends on your theory: It’s your theory that tells you which attributes to pay attention to, in judging the resemblance, and which to ignore. (Thus, if you’re thinking about computers, your “theory” about computers tells you that the color of the machine’s case is irrelevant. If, in contrast, you’re identifying types of birds, your knowledge tells you that color is an important attribute.)
You also draw on your theory for classifying new, unexpected cases (in the chapter, we used the example of recognizing someone as “drunk” when they jumped into a swimming pool fully clothed). Likewise, you use your theory to guide your inferences about a concept (allowing you to decide, for example, that an illness carried by fleas is likely to affect your dog, but probably not your goldfish).
Let’s be clear, then, that learning a definition for some new concept is a good place to start, but you shouldn’t be fooled into thinking that knowing the definition is the same as understanding the concept, or that knowing the definition is the same as mastery of the concept. Indeed, if you only know the definition, you may end up using your concept foolishly. (“That couldn’t be a computer; it’s the wrong color!”)
What other information do you need, in addition to the definition? At the least, you should seek out some examples of the new concept, because you’ll often be able to draw analogies based on these examples. You also want to think about what these examples have in common; that will help you develop a prototype for the category. Above all, though, you want to think about what makes these count as examples—what is it about them that puts them into the category? How are the examples different, and why are they all in the same category despite these differences? Why are other candidates, apparently similar to these examples, not in the category? Are some of the qualities of the examples predictable from other qualities? What caused these qualities to be as they are?
These questions (and other questions like them) will help you to start building the network of beliefs that provide your theory about this concept. These beliefs will help you to understand and use the concept. But, as the chapter discusses, these beliefs are also part of the concept—providing the knowledge base that specifies, in your thoughts, what the concept is all about.
These various points put an extra burden on you and your teachers. It would be easier if the teacher could simply provide a crisp definition for you to memorize, and then you could go ahead and commit that definition to memory. But that’s not what it means to learn a concept, and strict attention just to a definition will leave you with a conceptual representation that’s not very useful, and certainly far less rich than you want.
Critical Questions
| 1. fiogf49gjkf0d Why is a definitional approach inadequate to explain our understanding of concepts and categories? |
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| 2. When learning a new concept, why is it important to seek out examples in addition to learning definitions? |
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| 3. Choose a concept or a key term that you recently learned about, either in your cognitive psychology class or another class you are taking. Apply what you have learned about definitions, prototypes, exemplars, and theories to this concept. How might your mental representation of this concept be changing as you learn more about it? |
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