Cognitive Psych Final Exam Terms

Russian v. English speaker study

- Russian vs. English speaker differentiating between two different blues - Russians were faster when color crossed boundary -- no difference with English speakers - when doing a concurrent verbal task, the difference disappeared

source memory

- a form of memory that enables a person to recollect the episode in which learning took place or the time and place in which a particular stimulus was encountered - if this memory is available, recognition responses are similar to recall - "yes I saw this word before"

problem space

- all states and methods that can be reached when solving the problem

Illusion of Truth

- an effect of implicit memory in which claims that are familiar end up seeming more plausible - ex: participants read a series of statements and were told that some of them were false - participants saw the sentences again and had to judge whether they were true - statements that they have heard before - even those that had been labeled as false - were later judged to be more credible than sentences they had never heard before

hill climbing strategy

- at any point, pick the route that moves you closer to the final goal - problems: think only one step ahead - sometimes the straight path isn't the right one

means-end analysis

- compare the current state to the goal and ask "what can I do to make these more alike" - often will involve breaking the larger goal into subgoals or subproblems - includes backtracking

well-defined problem

- completely specified starting conditions, goal state, and methods for achieving the goal - ex: converting english to metric units, maze, etc.

lexical ambiguity

- confusing word meanings - when words have multiple meanings - ex: He was bothered by the cold (illness or outside temperature) - a problem for computerized translation

problem

- consists of some initial state in which a person begins and a goal state that is to be attained, plus a non-obvious ay of getting from the first to the second (methods or operators)

Tenejapan Mayans

- don't use terms left or right - though the language uses them - prefer to use terms that translate to uphill or downhill -- roughly corresponds to north/south axis - better at finding north box in geocentric condition of the spinning chair - understand left/right and do not have a better understanding of north/south or uphill/downhill

availability heuristic

- ease with which examples come to mind is an index of frequency or likelihood - based on what is most available in our memory - influenced by what we hear people talk about the most - errors may be due to illusionary covariation (relationship between two variables when there really isn't one -- the more ice cream sold means more murders in the summer) - ex: in the english language, are there more words that start with the letter "R" or with the letter "R" in the third position

Tower of Hanoi Problem

- example of a well-defined problem - 3 pegs, 3 rings of varying size - goal: take all rings to move from left peg to the right - constraints: move one ring at a time and cannot put a larger ring on top of a smaller one

source confusion

- eyewitness mays elect someone from a photo line up based on familiarity rather than recall - in one study, participants falsely believed they saw a person commit a crime when, in truth, they had actually seen that person in a previous photograph - the likelihood of error: 29%

Wernicke's Aphasia

- fluent - able to produce words, but they may not make sense

Schwarz et. al Study

- group of students asked to recall past episodes in which they had been assertive - one group gave 6 examples, and another group gave 12 examples - harder to think of 12 examples - group who were asked to think of 6 examples thought of themselves as more assertive

phoneme

- smallest units of sound - around 40 in each language - different phonemes in different languages - child under 6 mo. can understand different phonemes from different languages

ill-defined problem

- some aspects are not completely specified - sometimes not obvious when the goal has been reached - ex: finding your soulmate, choosing a career - solve by adding constraints, defining the goal state, creating sub-goals

Wernicke's Area

- speech comprehension

Broca's Area

- speech production

base rates

- information about how frequently something occurs in general (baseline) - more likely to pay attention with background information - does wearing lucky shoelaces actually increase your chances of winning a game?

Whorfian Hypothesis

- language determines thought (strong interpretation) - linguistic categories influence thought (weaker interpretation)

color perception

- languages differ in their basic color terms - number of terms - where boundaries are drawn in color space

state dependent learning

- memory can be influenced by outside environment or mood - example of studying drunk/taking the test drunk

encoding specificity

- memory is best when encoding and retrieval contexts are similar - study involving scuba divers learning a set of words underwater then take the test on land vs. underwater -- performed better underwater

speech segmentation

- no silences between words - context helps ( phoneme restoration effect) - visual cues help by looking at lips (McGurk Effect: watch a video of a person pronouncing a phoneme -- does the sound influence your perception of the phoneme)

Broca's Aphasia

- non fluent - have difficulty producing words

path constraints

- obstacles or restrictions that rule out some method options

recall

- participant must generate the studied items, often in response to a contextual cue - "what was the name of the restaurant that we went to?" - requires a search through memory and depends heavily on whether retrieval paths are available

recognition

- studied items are presented to the participant, who decides whether they were encountered before - "is this the name of the restaurant?"

Is there a categorical perception of color without language?

- study done with 4 month old infants (pre-linguistic) - find a colored dot on a different colored field - colors are either within or between categories - track with eye tracking device whether the infant sees the dot - results: both infants and adults are faster to fixate on "between" categories than "within" category targets

visualization

- problem solving strategy - creating a picture can help make a difficult problem more understandable - book work problem

analogies

- problem solving strategy - mapping knowledge from one domain (or experience) to another - focuses on structural relations instead of surface level relations - ex: Duncker's Ray problem

source monitoring

- process used to to determine origins of a memory - "where do I know her from?"

familiarity

- recognition responses can be based on this feeling - "this feels familiar, so I must have seen it recently"

Man Who Errors

- representative heuristic error - one example does not make the overall population - where anecdotal evidence overrides real info - "do not buy a Ford.. we had one and it fell apart in two years"

Gambler's Fallacy

- representative heuristic error - reflects an inaccurate understanding of probability - if something happens more frequently in the past it is less likely to happen in the future or visa versa - heads vs. tails example

referential ambiguity

- same wording/phrase can refer to two different things in a sentence - ex: John grabbed his lunch, sat on a rock, and ate it (referring to eating the rock or his lunch)

syntactical ambiguity

- same words can be group together into more than one phrase structure - ex: (they are) (cooking apples) vs. (they are cooking) (apples)

heuristics

- simple rule/mental shortcut - allow us to make judgments quickly - gain efficiency but lose accuracy - fast, but we can override them by using slower systems to think through problems

morphemes

- smallest unit with meaning - prefixes, suffixes, roots - can be entire words - 50,000-80,000 - language has rules for combining them

Implicit Memory: Priming

- think of a beach and are given SH_ _ _ to complete the word - You are more likely to think of words that relate to a beach (i.e., shore)

Increasing Logic

- training can influence the likelihood of better (slower) reasoning - for instance, participants can be trained that larger samples of data are more reliable than small samples

representative heuristic

- used when making judgments about the probability of an event under uncertainty - we often judge whether object "X" belongs to class "Y" because of how representative (prototypical) it is - judgment by similarity

attribution substitutions

- used when we do not have access to a desired piece of info - substitute in what you assume is accurate info when you are missing the full info - to do this you use a number of heuristics (shortcuts)

anchoring and adjustment heuristic

- we accept or rely on the first piece of info when making a decision - once the anchor is set, we adjust incrementally from it

mere exposure effect

- we like things more afters imply being exposed to them multiple times - ex: TV commercials, campaigns, friends

source misattribution

- when we are wrong where a memory came from - "Don't I know you from chemistry class? No? Never mind"

retrieval paths

connections between the newly acquired material and representations already in memeory