Concepts, Meaning, and Definitions
 

By Dr. Charles Wallis

Last Revision 2/28/2012


 

Animated gifs for all Diagrams in the Concepts Chapter

 
Animated gif illustrating the wide diversity of objects, materials, colors, and shapes that fall under the concept of a bottle.  Click to play.

 

 
Diagram depicting (1) the relationship between a sample and a population, (2) the relationship between a representative sample and a population, and (3) the relationship between an unrepresentative sample and a population.  Click diagram to see animation.

 
Schematic drawing depicting statistical inference and its underlying assumptions.  The inference takes information about the sample and infers a similar range of values in the population based upon well-known representativeness relationships between randomly selected samples of certain sizes and the population.  Click on diagram to display animated version. 

 
Schematic drawing depicting the representativeness heuristic inference and its underlying assumptions.  The inference determines a value for the probability of a property, object, event, or relation in the sample—in this case a concept or schema representation—it infers a similar range of values in the population.  The bases (underlying implicit assumptions) behind the representativeness heuristic are:  (1) The assumption that the concept or schema is representative of the population. (2) The assumption that the concept or schema representativeness with respect to the populations includes target parameter (object, property, event, or relation).  That is, that the value for the target parameter as given by the concept or schema is representative of the value for the target parameter in the population.  Click on diagram to display animated version. 

 
Animation displaying the variety of triangles clearly falling under the definition of a triangle.  Click the image to view the animation.

 
Animated movie illustrating the general process of categorization proposed by the prototype theory of concepts.  The example illustrates the data for robins and penguins listed in the table to the left.  Click on picture to view animation.