Concept Learning - Methods of Learning A Concept

Methods of Learning A Concept

  1. discovery - Every baby must rediscover concepts for itself, such as discovering that each of its fingers can be individually controlled or that care givers are individuals. Although this is perception driven, formation of the concept is more than memorizing perceptions.
  2. examples - Supervised or unsupervised generalizing from examples may lead to learning a new concept, but concept formation is more than generalizing from examples.
  3. words - Hearing or reading new words leads to learning new concepts, but forming a new concept is more than learning a dictionary definition. A person may have previously formed a new concept before encountering the word or phrase for it.
  4. exemplars comparison - Another efficient way for learning new categories and inducing new categorization rule is by comparing few objects when their categorical relation is known. For example, comparing two exemplars while being informed that the two are from the same category allows identifying the attributes shared by the category members, and the permitted variability within this category. On the other hand, comparing two exemplars while informed that the two are from different categories may allow identifying attributes with diagnostic value. Interestingly, within category and between categories comparison are not always similarly useful for category learning, and the capacity of using either one of these two forms of learning by comparison is subject to changes during early childhood (Hammer et al., 2009).
  5. invention - When prehistoric people who lacked tools used their fingernails to scrape food from killed animals or smashed melons, they noticed that a broken stone sometimes had a sharp edge like a fingernail and suitable for scraping food. Inventing a stone tool to avoid broken fingernails was a new concept.

Read more about this topic:  Concept Learning

Famous quotes containing the words methods of, methods, learning and/or concept:

    “A woman might claim to retain some of the child’s faculties, although very limited and defused, simply because she has not been encouraged to learn methods of thought and develop a disciplined mind. As long as education remains largely induction ignorance will retain these advantages over learning and it is time that women impudently put them to work.”
    —Germaine Greer (b. 1939)

    “A writer who writes, “I am alone” ... can be considered rather comical. It is comical for a man to recognize his solitude by addressing a reader and by using methods that prevent the individual from being alone. The word alone is just as general as the word bread. To pronounce it is to summon to oneself the presence of everything the word excludes.”
    —Maurice Blanchot (b. 1907)

    “Nature will not let us fret and fume. She does not like our benevolence or our learning much better than she likes our frauds and wars. When we come out of the caucus, or the bank, or the abolition-convention, or the temperance-meeting, or the transcendental club, into the fields and woods, she says to us, “so hot? my little Sir.””
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    “The concept of a person is logically prior to that of an individual consciousness. The concept of a person is not to be analysed as that of an animated body or an embodied anima.”
    —Sir Peter Frederick Strawson (b. 1919)