How did I get all this knowledge in my head?

How do we know what we know? We rely on concepts, categories, and schemas. Categorization means the same thing in psychology as it means in daily life; it’s the process by which we place things into groups, or categories. For example, you have probably categorized receipts for taxes, or at least I did this when I interned at a law firm. I had to learn what receipts fell into what category to file them accordingly; an example from my experience would be restaurant receipts being filed with personal expenses, but parking slips or court personnel receipts being filed with court expenses. We use these categories to understand things we have never seen before and use that new understanding to adjust our schemas (ooh the connection is so exciting!). An example of this from my internship would include when I found delivery receipts for court documents: was this a personal expense or a court expense? I had to adjust personal expenses to include receipts for things relevant to court that were considered personal and professional responsibility (like photocopying evidence documents for the opposing side).

Now let’s see where schemas come in. Schemas are generalized definitions we make about categories. By watching the link you can see how schemas present in the movie “Bambi.”

*watch link now* schema example in the movie "Bambi"

As you can see, Bambi thought the flower was a butterfly because it fit his general definition of a butterfly. When he learned that it was not a butterfly, but was a flower, he created a new general definition, or schema, for all flowers. Therefore, when the skunk popped out of the ground and was “pretty,” Bambi thought the skunk was a flower. We constantly readjust old schemas and create new schemas so that we can have a place for everything. This helps us sort things we do not recognize, such as an odd looking animal or a super modern car.     

Another example of categorization and schemas occurs when you glance at the picture above. If you look at it quickly, you likely think “oh, it is orange with black stripes, four legs, and a tail; it must be a tiger.” However, when you examine it more closely you might realize the face looks more like that of a dog and might even take into account situational factors such as the white picket fence. So is it a tiger or is it a dog? Obviously you are able to figure out that this is a dog decorated to look like a tiger, so you categorize this with the other dogs. This seems easy, but things become more difficult when you try to figure out just how categorization works; we’re not even sure.       

Here I’ll explain different theories of categorization and you can choose which one you think is right. The first approach is the definitional approach to categorization. This approach argues that we determine members of categories by defining the category and then determining if the object fits the definition. The flaws with this approach stem from the definition itself; it is often so specific that it excludes things that should belong yet so vague that it includes things that don’t. The prototype approach to categorization argued that first you determine the prototype, or “typical” member, of a category and then compare the object in question to that prototype to determine category membership. The flaw with the prototype approach is that some categories don’t have a typical member; some categories are even ad hoc categories. This is how the exemplar approach to categorization arose; this approach focuses on exemplars, or actual members of the category that a person has encountered in the past. The main flaw that I can see with this is if you don’t encounter a type of bird, does that mean it is not a bird? So I don’t know which approach is correct, perhaps none of them are. But nonetheless they all improve our insight into how our mind puts things into categories without us actively thinking about it. Whether or not we can’t explain it, it sure is impressive.