Chapters 11,12, 13
Consider the sentence, "Because he always jogs a mile seems like a short distance to him." The principle of late closure states that this sentence would first be parsed into which of the following phrases?
"Because he always jogs a mile"
Wason four-card problem
A conditional reasoning task developed by Wason that involves four cards. Various versions of this problem have been used to study the mechanisms that determine the outcomes of conditional reasoning tasks.
Denying the antecedent
A conditional syllogism of the following form: If p, then q; not p; therefore, not q.
Denying the consequent
A conditional syllogism of the following form: If p, then q; not q; therefore, not p. The consequent, q, is denied in the second premise. This is a valid from of conditional syllogism.
Affirming the antecedent
A conditional syllogism of the following form: If p, then q; p; therefore, q. The antecedent, p, is affirmed in the second premise. This is a valid form of conditional syllogism.
Affirming the consequent
A conditional syllogism of the following form: If p, then q; q; therefore, p. This is an invalid form of conditional syllogism.
Illusory correlation
A correlation that appears to exist between two events, when in reality there is no correlation or it is weaker than it is assumed to be.
Risk aversion strategy
A decision-making strategy that is governed by the idea of avoiding risk. Often used when a problem is stated in terms of gains.
Risk-taking strategy
A decision-making strategy that is governed by the idea of taking risks. Often used when a problem is stated in terms of losses.
Ultimatum game
A game in which a proposer is given a sum of money and makes an offer to a responder as to how this money should be split between them. The responder must choose to accept the offer or reject it. This game has been used to study people's decision-making strategies.
Situation model
A mental representation of what a text is about.
Reverse acrobat problem
A modification of the acrobat problem that is used to show how the way a problem is stated can influence its difficulty.
Lexicon
A person's knowledge of what words mean, how they sound, and how they are used in relation to other words.
Permission schema
A pragmatic reasoning schema that states that if a person satisfied condition A, then they get to carry out action B. The permission schema has been used to explain the results of the Wason four-card problem.
Mental set
A preconceived notion about how to approach a problem, which is determined by a person's; experience or what has worked in the past.
Water-jug problem
A problem first described by Luchins, that illustrates how mental set can influence the strategies that people use to solve a problem.
Two-string problem
A problem first described by Maier in which a person is given the task of attaching two strings together that are too far apart to be reached at the same time. This task was devised to illustrate the operation of functional fixedness.
Ill-defined problem
A problem in which it is difficult to specify a clear goal state or specific operators. Many real-life problems are ill-defined problems.
Acrobat problem
A problem involving acrobats that is similar to the Tower of Hanoi problem. Used to illustrate how the way a problem is stated can influence its difficulty.
Tower of Hanoi problem
A problem involving moving discs from one set of pegs to another. It has been used to illustrate the process involved in means-end analysis.
Source problem(or story)
A problem or story that is analogous to the target problem and which therefore provides information that can lead to a solution to the target problem.
Radiation problem
A problem posed by Duncker that involves finding a way to destroy a tumor by radiation without damaging other organs int he body. This problem has been widely used to study the role of analogy in problem solving.
Well-defined problem
A problem that has a correct answer. There are usually procedures that, when applied correctly, will lead to a solution.
Mutilated checkerboard problem
A problem that has been used to study how the statement of a problem influences a person'a ability to reach a solution.
Target problem
A problem to be solved. In analogical problem solving, solution of this problem can become easier when the problem-solver is exposed to an analogous source problem or story.
Candle problem
A problem, first described by Duncker, in which a person is given a number of objects and is given the task of mounting a candle on a wall so it can burn without dripping wax on the floor. This problem was used to study functional fixedness.
Means-end analysis
A problem-solving strategy that seeks to reduce the difference between the initial and goal states. This is achieved by creating subgoals, intermediate states that are closer to the goal.
Lexical decision task
A procedure in which a person is asked to decide as quickly as possible whether a particular stimulus is a word or a nonword.
Think-aloud protocol
A procedure in which participants are asked to say out loud what they are thinking while doing a problem. This procedure is used to help determine people's thought processes as they are solving a problem.
Garden path sentence
A sentencer in which the meaning that seems to be implied at the beginning of the sentence turns out to be incorrect, based on information that is presented later in the sentence.
Syllogism
A series of three statements: two premises followed by a conclusion. The conclusion can follow from the premises based on the rules of logic.
Temporary ambiguity
A situation in which the meaning of a sentence, based on its initial words, is ambiguous because a number of meanings are possible, depending on how the sentence unfolds. "Cast iron quickly rust" is an example of a sentence that creates temporary ambiguity.
Problem
A situation in which there is an obstacle between a present state and a goal state and it is not immediately obvious how to get around the obstacle.
Categorical syllogism
A syllogism in which the premises and conclusion describe the relationship between two categories by using statements that being with all, no, or some.
Language
A system of communication through which we code and expres our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences.
Creative cognition
A technique developed by Finke to train people to think creatively.
Analogical encoding
A technique in which people compare two problems that illustrate a principle. This technique is designed to help people discover similar structural features of cases or problems.
Pragmatic reasoning schema
A way of thinking about cause and effect in the world that is learned as part of experiencing everyday life.
Neuroeconomics
An approach to studying decision making that combines research from the fields of psychology, neuroscience, and economics.
Functional fixedness
An effect that occurs when the ideas a person has about an object's function inhibit the person's ability to use the object for a different function. See also Fixation (in problem solving).
Social exchange theory
An important aspect of human behavior is the ability for two people to cooperate in a way that is beneficial to both people. According to the evolutionary perspective on cognition, application of this theory can lead to the conclusion that detecting cheating is an important part of the brain's cognitive makeup. This idea has been used to explain the results of the Wason four-card problem.
Instrument inference
An inference about tools or methods that occurs while reading text or listening to speech.
Anaphoric inference
An inference that connects an object or person in one sentence to an object or person in another sentence.
Causal inference
An inference that results in the conclusion that the events described in one clause or sentence were caused by events that occurred in a pervious clause or sentence.
Stereotype
An oversimplified generalization about a group or class of people that often focuses on negative characteristics.
Availability heuristic
Basing judgments of the frequency of events on what events come to mind.
Which of the following statements does NOT apply to the results of research on differences between how experts and novices solve problems?
Being an expert in one field can transfer to better problem solving in another field.
Reasoning
Cognitive processes by which people start with information and come to conclusions that go beyond that information.
Which property below is NOT one of the characteristics that makes human language unique?
Communication
Framing effect
Decisions are influenced by how the choices are stated.
Expected emotion
Emotion that a person predicts he or she will feel for a particular outcome of a decision.
Immediate emotion
Emotion that is experienced at the tie a decision is being made.
Syntactic priming
Hearing a statement with a particular syntactic construction increases the chances that a statement that follows will be produced with the same construction.
Integral immediate emotion
Immediate emotion that is associated with the act of making a decision.
Incidental immediate emotion
Immediate emotion unrelated to the decision. An example is an emotion associated with a person's general disposition.
Antecedent
In a conditional syllogism, the term p in the conditional premise "If p, then q."
Consequent
In a conditional syllogism, the term q in the conditional premise "If p, then q."
Given-new contract
In a conversation, a speaker should construct sentences so that they contain both given information (information that the listener already knows) and new information (information that the listener is hearing for the first time).
Late closure
In parsing, when a person encounters a new word, the parser assumes that this word is part of the current phrase.
Fixation
In perception and attention, a pausing of the eyes on places of interest while observing a scene.
Operator
In problem solving, permissible moves that can be made toward a problem's solution.
Goal state
In problem solving, the condition that occurs when a problem has been solved.
Initial state
In problem solving, the conditions at the beginning of a problem.
Intermediate states
In problem solving, the various conditions that exist along the pathways between the initial and goal states.
Subgoals
In the means-end analysis approach to problem solving, intermediate states that move the process of solution closer to the goal.
Lydia is 48 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy as an undergraduate. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and she participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations. Which of the following alternatives is most probable?
Lydia is a U.S. Congresswoman.
Analogy
Making a comparison in order to show a similarity between two different things.
Decisions
Making choices between alternatives.
Gick and Holyoak consider which of the following to be the most difficult step to achieve in the process of analogical problem solving?
Noticing that there is an analogous relationship between problems because most participants need prompting before they notice a connection.
In vivo problem-solving research
Observing people to determine how they solve problem sin real-world situations. This technique has been used to study the use of analogy in a number of different settings, including laboratory meetings of a university research group and design brainstorming sessions in an industrial research and development department.
Utility
Outcomes that achieve a person's goals; in economic terms, the maximum monetary payoff.
Analogical paradox
Participants in psychological experiments tend to focus on surface features in analogy problems. whereas people in the real world frequently use deeper, more structural features.
Experts
Person who, by devoting a large amount of time to learning about a field and participating and applying that learning, has become acknowledged as being extremely skilled or knowledgeable in that field.
Design fixation
Presenting a sample design influences the creation of new designs.
Lexical priming
Priming that involves the meaning of words. Typically occurs when a word is followed by another word with a similar meaning--for example, when presenting the word ant before the word bug causes a person to respond faster to the word bug than if ant had not preceded it.
Opt-out procedure
Procedure in which a person must take an active step to avoid a course of action--for example, choosing not to be an organ donor.
Opt-in procedure
Procedure in which a person must take an active step to chose a course of action--for example, choosing to be an organ donor.
Validity
Quality of a syllogism whose conclusion follows logically from its premises.
Inductive reasoning
Reasoning in which a conclusion follows from a consideration of evidence. This conclusion is stated as being probably true, rather than definitely true, as can be the case for the conclusions from deductive reasoning.
Deductive reasoning
Reasoning that involves syllogisms in which a conclusion logically follows from premises.
In a study, participants listened to the following tape recording: Rumor had it that, for years, the government building had been plagued with problems. The man was not surprised when he found several spiders, roaches, and other bugs in the corner of the room. As participants heard the word "bugs," they completed a lexical decision task to a test stimulus flashed on a screen. Results showed that the participants responded most slowly to the test stimulus:
SKY
Surface features
Specific elements that make up a problem. For example, in the radiation problem,needing high intensity to fix something surrounded by material that could be damaged by high intensity.
Insight
Sudden realization of a problem's solution.
Analogical transfer
The application of problem-solving strategies experienced in solving one problem to the solution of another, similar problem.
Syntax-first approach to parsing
The approach to parsing that emphasizes the role of syntax. See also Interactionist approach to parsing.
Interactionist approach to parsing
The approach to parsing that takes into account all information--both semantic and syntactic--to determine parsing as a person reads a sentence. This approach assigns more weight to semantics than does the syntax-first approach to parsing.
Psycholinguistics
The field concerned with the psychological study of language.
Premise
The first two statements in a syllogism. The third statement is the conclusion.
You are conducting a study on how fluency influences the phonemic restoration effect. You study two groups of non-native English speakers, one with a year of English classes and the other with 10 years. All of your stimuli are in English. Who would you expect to show the greatest phonemic restoration effect?
The group with 10 years of English instruction.
Word superiority effect
The idea that letters are easier to identify when they are part of a word than when they are seen in isolation or in a string of letters that do not form a word.
Evolutionary perspective on cognition
The idea that many properties of our minds can be traced to the evolutionary principles of natural selection.
Expected utility theory
The idea that people are basically rational, so if they have all of the relevant information, they will make a decision that results in the maximum expected utility.
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
The idea that the nature of language in a particular culture can affect the way people in that culture think.
Problem space
The initial state, goal state, and all the possible intermediate states for a particular problem.
Law of large numbers
The larger the number of individuals that are randomly drawn from a population, the more representative the resulting group will be of the entire population.
Semantics
The meanings of words and sentences. Distinguished from Syntax.
Parsing
The mental grouping of words in a sentence into phrases. The way a sentence is parsed determines its meaning.
Word frequency effect
The phenomenon of faster reading time for high-frequency words than for low-frequency words.
Conjunction rule
The probability of the conjunction of two events (such as feminist and bank teller) cannot be higher than the probability of the single constituents (feminist alone or bank teller alone).
Representativeness heuristic
The probability that an event A comes from class B can be determined by how well A resembles the properties of class B.
Inference
The process by which readers create information that is not explicitly stated in the text.
Restructuring
The process of changing a problem's representation. According to the Gestalt psychologists, restructuring is the key mechanism of problem solving.
Speech segmentation
The process of perceiving individual words within the continuous flow of the speech signal.
Falsification principle
The reasoning principle that to test a rule, it is necessary to look for situations that would falsify the rule.
Base rate
The relative proportions of different classes in a population. Failure to consider base rates can often lead to errors of reasoning.
Word frequency
The relative usage of words in a particular language. For example, in English, home has higher word frequency than hike.
Coherence
The representation of a text or story in a reader's mind so that information in one part of the tet or story is related to information in another part.
Syntax
The rules for combining words into sentences. Distinguished from Semantics.
Phoneme
The shortest segment of speech that, if changed, changes the meaning of a word.
Morpheme
The smallest unit of language that has a definable meaning or a grammatical function. For example, truck consists of a number of phonemes but only one morpheme, because none of the components that create the word truck means anything.
Omission bias
The tendency to do nothing to avoid having to make a decision that could be interpreted as causing harm.
Risk aversion
The tendency to make decisions that avoid risk.
Confirmation bias
The tendency to selectively look for information that conforms to our hypothesis and to over look information that argues against it.
Structural features
The underlying principle of a problem. For example, in the radiation problem, needing high intensity to fix something surrounded by material that could be damaged by high intensity.
Analogical problem solving
The use of analogies as an aid to solving problems. Typically, a solution to one problem, the source problem, is presented that is analogous to the solution to another problem, the target problem.
Divergent thinking
Thinking that is open-ended, involving a large number of potential solutions. Can be contrasted with Convergent thinking.
Convergent thinking
Thinking that works toward finding a solution to a specific problem that usually has a correct answer. Can be contrasted with Divergent thinking.
Which problem provides an example of how functional fixedness can hinder solution of a problem?
Two-string problem.
Phonemic restoration effect
WHen a phoneme in a word is heard even though it is obscured by a noise, such as a cough. This typically occurs when the word is part of a sentence.
Lexical ambiguity
When a word can have more than one meaning For example, bug can mean an insect, a listening device, or to annoy.
Ill-defined problems are so named because it is difficult to specify ________ for the problems.
a single correct answer.
Dr. Curious is doing a follow-up study to the mutilated checkerboard problem experiment. In this new study, participants solve the following shoe problem before tackling the checkerboard problem. By doing this, Dr. Curious is studying the effect of ________ on problem solving. The shoe problem: A first-grade class is using a trampoline in gym class, so all the children have removed their shoes, which are all jumbled in a large pile. One of the students, Miguel, is leaving early, so the teacher tells him to grab his shoes and report to the lobby. In his hurry, Miguel grabs two identical left-footed, size 6 red sneakers and runs to his mother still sock-footed. Will the remaining students be able to shoe-up with the remaining shoes without getting a foot-ache?
analogies
Boxing champion George Foreman recently described his family vacations with the statement, "At our ranch in Marshall, Texas, there are lots of ponds and I take the kids out and we fish. And then of course, we grill them." That a reader understands "them" appropriately (George grills fish, not his kids!) is the result of a(n) ________ inference.
anaphoric.
Wally and Sharon are out on a date. When Sharon asks Wally where they should go for dinner, Wally says "My coworkers keep telling me about that new Japanese place downtown, so it must be a great place to eat." Wally's response illustrates the use of a(n):
availability heuristic.
The typical purpose of subgoals is to:
bring the problem solver closer and closer to the goal state.
Of the following real-world phenomena, the confirmation bias best explains the observation that people:
can cite several reasons for their position on a controversial issue but none for the opposing side.
If you are given the information that in order to vote in a presidential election, you must be at least 18 years of age, and that Will voted in the last presidential election, you can logically conclude that Will is at least 18 years old. This is an example of using ________ reasoning.
deductive
Metcalfe and Wiebe gave participants problems to solve and asked them to make "warmth" judgments every 15 seconds to indicate how close they felt they were to a solution. The purpose of this experiment was to:
demonstrate a difference between how people solve insight and non-insight problems.
Consider the following conditional syllogism: Premise 1: If I study, then I'll get a good grade. Premise 2: I didn't study. Conclusion: Therefore, I didn't get a good grade. This syllogism is an example of:
denying the antecedent.
The creative cognition approach that Finke used to get people to "invent" useful objects is an example of:
divergent thinking.
Tanenhaus and coworkers' eye movement study presented participants with different pictures for interpreting the sentence, "Put the apple on the towel in the box." Their results showed the importance of ________ in how we understand sentences in real-life situations.
environmental context.
Swinney's lexical priming studies using ambiguous words as stimuli show that context:
exerts its influence after all meanings of the word have been briefly accessed.
PFC-damaged patients have trouble with reading comprehension tasks. They are unable to:
follow the order of events in the story.
Juanita is in a convenience store considering which soda to buy. She recalls a commercial for BigFizz she saw on TV last night. BigFizz is running a promotion where you look under the bottle cap, and one in five bottles has a voucher for a free soda. If Juanita decides to purchase a BigFizz based on this promotion, which is framed in terms of ________, she will use a ________ strategy.
gains; risk-aversion.
Noam Chomsky proposed that:
humans are genetically programmed to acquire and use language.
The validity of a syllogism depends on:
its form.
In Belilock and Carr's study of the relationship between working memory capacity and problem solving, individuals with high working memory capacity performed best in the ________ condition.
low-pressure.
The permission schema is an example of a(n):
pragmatic reasoning schema.
A psycholinguist conducts an experiment with a group of participants from a small village in Asia and another from a small village in South America. She asked the groups to describe the bands of color they saw in a rainbow and found they reported the same number of bands as their language possessed primary color words. These results:
support the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
Janet is alone in a room that contains a chair and a shelf with a book resting on top. She attempts to retrieve the book, but the shelf is a foot above her reach. How will Janet retrieve the book? Psychologists would NOT classify this scenario as a problem because:
the solution is immediately obvious.
The word "bad" has ______phoneme(s).
three
People tend to overestimate:
what negative feelings will occur following a decision more so than positive feelings.