Methods of Learning A Concept
- 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.
- examples - Supervised or unsupervised generalizing from examples may lead to learning a new concept, but concept formation is more than generalizing from examples.
- 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.
- 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).
- 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.
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