Concept Formation or: how we learn things…

Concept formation relates to making connections and seeing relationships between items of information, and defining a concept from it. Concept formation is a key skill required for learning of new ideas, thoughts or subjects.

The way that we learn new concepts is highly researched, and quite a few theories have been developed. You can get a taste of this amazing area through these studies we have picked up for you:

- Clark Hull (1920) and the stimulus-response association theory: we learn to associate a particular response (the concept) with a variety of stimuli that define the concept. For instance, we associate the concept “dog” with all of the characteristics of dogs (four legs, fur, tail, and so on) and are able to generalize the concept to unfamiliar dogs.

- Jerome Bruner and others (1956) and the strategy testing theorem: we develop a strategy of testing our hypotheses about a concept by making guesses about which attributes are essential for defining the concept.

- Eleanor Rosch (1978) and the natural concepts in everyday life: concepts are learned through examples rather than abstract rules. Her exemplar theory proposes that we learn the concept of “dog” by seeing a wide variety of dogs and developing a prototype of what the typical dog is like.

- Jean Piaget, argued that learning entails an understanding of a phenomenon’s characteristics and how they are logically linked. Noam Chomsky later argued that certain cognitive structures (such as basic grammatical rules) are innate in human beings. Both scholars held that, as a concept emerges, it becomes subject to testing: a child’s concept of “bird,” for example, will be tested against specific instances of birds.

As sometimes this is the process of developing abstract rules or mental constructs based on sensory experience, a more complex application of concept formation is how we relate to more general concepts. We choose to group and sort them into concepts will depend upon our interests, beliefs, values, and experiences with the environment. The concept “job” can have a positive meaning, or a place for achievements and wealth.

The concept formation allows us to create rules and generalizations and every field of our lives.