Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

Neuroscience in Your Life: 
How We Learn 
to Categorize Our World Using Concepts
FIGURE 2
To illustrate how the brain learns to categorize objects using concepts, participants 
in a study were trained to identify specifi c models of a car, such as Toyotas versus Hondas 
(labeled “subordinate” categories in the fi gure). Others were trained to identify them as general 
categories, such as SUVs versus sedans (labeled as “basic” categories). Others simply viewed 
photos of cars (labeled “exposure”). Measures of electrical activity in the brain diff ered according 
to the level of categorization on which participants had been trained. 
(Source: Scott et al., 2008)
Basic
Exposure
Subordinate
2.2
v
2.2
v
N250
Subordinate
P
ost-T
est
Exposure
Basic
100 0
100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800
1
0
1
2
3
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2
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Module 23 
Thinking and Reasoning 
247
Reasoning: Making Up Your Mind
Professors deciding when students’ assignments are due.
An employer determining who to hire out of a pool of job applicants.
The president concluding that it is necessary to send troops to a foreign nation.
What do these three situations have in common? Each requires reasoning, the process 
by which information is used to draw conclusions and make decisions.
Although philosophers and logicians have considered the foundations of reason-
ing for centuries, it is only relatively recently that cognitive psychologists have begun 
to investigate how people reason and make decisions. Their efforts have contributed 
to our understanding of formal reasoning processes as well as the cognitive shortcuts 
we routinely use—shortcuts that sometimes may lead our reasoning capabilities 
astray (Johnson-Laird, 2006).