Categorization: a core cognitive process

Psych in the City 2007
Q: What do Radiology, National Security, Language and Birdwatching have in Common?
Dr. Mark Blair

A: They all involve categorization, a core cognitive process.

People are good at learning to make distinctions. They can distinguish between dogs and cats, they can tell when someone is angry, and they know a chair when they see one.

But not everything is easy to identify. Radiologists need years of training to detect tumors in x-ray films, for instance, and novice birder has little chance of distinguishing a summer tanager from a scarlet one.

Dr. Mark Blair's research is aimed at improving our understanding how humans are able to learn to classify things, accurately placing them into categories. The focus of his current work is on understanding how selective attention, the ability to pay attention to important features and ignore irrelevant ones, supports categorization, and interacts with our memory and perceptual systems.

Web site: http://www.sfu.ca/psyc/faculty/blair

Видео Categorization: a core cognitive process канала Simon Fraser University