Actual PSYCH Midterm 2

define nature nurture

"Nature" refers to what you are born with (e.g., genetics). "Nurture" refers to what happens to you (e.g., your environment, experiences).

In the Marcus 2006 reading, Pinker's selection discusses the transformation of a pidgin into a creole. What distinguishes a pidgin from a creole? What concept does the transformation demonstrate about human language capacity?

A pidgin, by definition, does not have a consistent grammar, and contains an inconsistent combination of vocabulary and structures from the two or more languages whose native speakers are attempting to communicate with one another. A pidgin can transform into a creole - which is a true language with a syntactical grammar - when first-generation speakers spontaneously and communally standardize it by introducing and imposing structure. This transformation - seen in the formation of Hawaiian Creole and the Idioma de Signos Nicaraguense (ISN), or Nicaraguan sign language - is interpreted as a sign that children are born with an "innate grammatical machinery," in large part because many of the structures that arise in creoles are shared with other unrelated languages not known to the speakers. (At least, this is the argument. There is some dispute about this in the case of the spoken pidgins.)

As people age, what are the changes in their temporal focus and emotional well-being? What explains this change?

According to Laura Carstensen and other researchers, as people age, they tend to change from "future-focused" to "present-focused." In fact, it seems that anyone with a sense of limited future time span tends to be "present-focused." Studies have found that not only older people, but HIV positive patients who do not think they will live for long, and young people who are about to move across country tend to be more "present-focused." For example, they wanted to spend time with people they are already familiar and close with rather than meeting new people. On average, people's emotional well-being appears to improve as they age. In a 10-year longitudinal study using an experience sampling method, Carstensen et al. found that positive emotional experiences improve as people age, and peak around 60-70. This might be because older people are better at managing emotions and focusing on positive experiences. For example, studies have shown that older people have better memory for emotionally positive photos than negative photos, and show stronger amygdala activation in response to positive images relative neutral ones. Younger people are more responsive to both positive and negatively balanced stimuli relative to neutral ones.

What is the circadian clock?

All humans (and animals in general, even bacteria) have a circadian "clock" that in humans enforces the imperative of daily sleep and its timing. The clock is sensitive to sunset and sunrise. Daylight (and bright artificial light) inhibits melatonin which tells the body when to sleep; thus, bright light at night can keep you awake, but bright light in the morning can also help you wake up.

The case of Phineas Gage

As discussed in class earlier, a rod was driven through his head in an accident, which severely damaged his frontal lobe. Gage displayed significant changes in his personality and became much more impulsive and disinhibited after the accident (Harlow, 1869).

According to Jean Piaget, all cognitive development depends on the processes of assimilation and accommodation. Define these two terms and give examples of each.

Assimilation is the process of putting new experiences into existing knowledge and existing theory (theory being what Piaget would call children's "schemas"). Assimilation is taking a particular instance and interpreting it using existing mental structures. The child drawing a triangle but assimilating it to a generic rectangle "shape" schema is a good example. Accommodation is the process of changing existing schemas to fit new experiences. This is learning - changing knowledge in response to new knowledge. For example, a child looks at how a fan works and builds a theory, which is that the fan (the moving thing) creates the wind. When this child goes out and sees a tree being blown by the wind, he will engage in the process of "assimilation," that is, he will think that the tree (moving branches) is the cause of the wind, just like the fan is the cause of the wind. The child is assimilating this outdoor experience to his or her schema of wind. If the child somehow finds out that the tree is not the cause of the wind, the child will engage in the process of "accommodation" to modify his theory on where wind comes from in order to fit this new experience.

Contrary to Piaget's theories, modern developmental researchers have found that infants do have certain sophisticated intuitions about the world around them. Describe one study that tested Piaget's theory of object permanence, as well as one study that examined infant intuitions about probability.

Baillargeon (1987): in this study, infants were shown a rigid sheet moving back and forth (like the motion of a laptop opening and closing), until the infants habituated. A box was then placed out of sight behind the rigid sheet, and the infants were shown either (1) a possible event, i.e., the rigid sheet stopped moving when it hit the box, or (2) an impossible event, i.e., the rigid sheet appeared to move straight through the box. The study found that the infants looked longer (were surprised) at the impossible event, suggesting that they have certain intuitions about the physics of the situation, even though they could not see the box. This is not what Piaget would have predicted, since he believed that infants of this age lack object permanence, and therefore would not be able to reason about objects they cannot see. Xu & Garcia (2008), Xu & Denison (2009): in this study, infants were shown 2 boxes that contained different proportions of colored balls (i.e., one box contained mostly pink balls, the other box contained mostly yellow balls). The experimenter would randomly take out 5 balls from a box. Infants would look longer at improbable outcomes (such as drawing 5 balls from the box with mostly pink balls, but getting mostly yellow balls). This suggests that even young infants have some form of "rational" thought, as well as some basic intuitions about probability.

Define Constructivism. How does Constructivism view cognitive development in terms of the nature/nurture debate?

Constructivism: According to Piaget, children are trying to organize their experience and knowledge in a systematic way. That occurs through the maturation of the brain (schemas, "operations") and through experience. The notion that children build structure from information and knowledge is central to constructivism. (beyond that the term is admittedly rather vague.)

What does cortisol do in your sleep cycle?

Cortisol is a hormone that peaks in the morning and increases alertness making you feel more awake. It's also relevant in the stress response.

What is the significance of the quotation, language "makes infinite use of finite means"? What role does the use of syntax and phrases play in enabling or constraining that?

Each human language makes meaningful distictions among a limited number of sounds and words, but almost any number of novel - yet intelligible - combinations of those units are possible. Syntax allows speakers of English, for example, to recognize the difference between "Dracula hates the wolfman" and "The wolfman hates Dracula," even though the 'ingredients' of those sentences are identical. Categories of words or phrases are the usual targets of syntactic rules which dictate how they may be formed and arranged to alter the meaning. However, some arrangements of phrases are forbidden within the grammar of a given langauge, even if they are interpretable ("What does John like the girl who wears?"). Some phrases are ambiguous in what is connected to what, or what has scope over what (in "old men and women," does "old" have scope over "men" or over the conjoined "men and women"?); this is hard to avoid when taking a hierarchy and expressing it as a linear sequence, just as it's hard to display the earth on a 2-D surface. These ambiguities are typically resolved by listeners effortlessly and without special attention, by using context and probability. Sometimes phrase structures make cognitive demands such as requiring that you remember the subject of a sentence that may be quite distant from its verb because lots of words (and embedded phrases) intervene.

How does speed of mental processing change developmentally?

From infancy to early adulthood: In a study on brain functioning, participants were asked to do simple tasks such as a digit-symbol code translation task, circling 2 same digits in a string of numbers, touching the light that is lit, etc. The results show that performance on such simple tasks gets faster and faster from infancy to early adulthood and peaks around 20 years old. From early adulthood on: As people age, speed of processing, working memory, and long-term memory tend to deteriorate and world knowledge tends to stay stable or even improve.

Explain how the arbitrariness of sounds to word meanings is useful.

If words that sound similar mean the same thing, then there are more opportunities for confusion, as related words are more likely to be discussed in the same context. However, if related concepts have more distinct sounds, then less precise perceptual knowledge is necessary for the listener to correctly interpret the intention of the speaker. (A relevant example in class was about two similar-sounding words for the right and left sides of a ship - in a storm, "starboard" and "port" are easier to distinguish than "starboard" and "larboard".)

Brain imaging studies

In a meta-analysis on the relationship between structural and functional deficits in frontal cortex and antisocial behavior, Yang and Raine (2009) show that antisocial individuals tend to have structural and functional impairments in the frontal lobe. The effect size is quite large (comparable to that of the relationship between attention scores and Attention Deficit Disorder). [Note that reduced frontal lobe functioning is often found in impulsive murderers. Murderers that plan the crime carefully often have normal frontal functioning]

Most studies in the field of neurocriminology are correlational, meaning that we know antisocial individuals have different brain functions but we don't know the causal direction. Please describe a study where we can make better causal inferences.

In a study conducted in Mauritius, researchers measured electrodermal fear conditioning in children at age 3. Poor fear conditioning implies poor amygdala functioning. Later, the researchers ascertained their criminal record at age 23. After controlling for gender, ethnicity and social adversity, they found that criminals had worse fear conditioning than non-criminals. This study implies that poorer fear conditioning (poor amygdala functioning) at age 3 predisposes to more crime in adulthood (Gao, Raine, et al., 2010). In such a case the criminal behavior cannot be causing the fear conditioning difference because they occur in the opposite order in time.

Describe one study result that supports the claim that practice and cognitive ability both matter for extraordinary performance in a particular domain.

In a study with skilled piano players, researchers found that sight reading performance correlated with both lifetime hours of practice (a measure of deliberate practice) and working memory (a measure of general cognitive ability that is thought to be fairly stable over time). The effects of practice were stronger, but both measures showed a substantial correlation with sight reading performance.

Why do teenagers tend to engage in risky and destructive behaviors? What are the potential explanations from neuroscience?

In general, teenagers' tendency to engage in risky and destructive behaviors isn't explained by arguing that they are misinformed or incapable of logical reasoning. Teenagers do not yet have fully developed frontal lobes, which are critical for cognitive control. Frontal lobe development permits more cognitive control, less leaping-to-conclusions, and more reasoned behavior. They also show increased sensitivity to dopamine, and therefore may be more sensitive to rewarding stimuli.

Distinguish between the "football throwing" model of conversation vs. the conversation as a project.

In the "football-throwing" model, conversations are an exchange of messages that are fully formed before transmission to each participant. In the conversation-as-a-project view, the exchange is much more interactive and shaped by each member's responses in turn, including nuanced signals for beginning to talk, changing topics, signaling an intent to finish talking, and so on.

What is insomnia?

Insomnia is in the inability to sleep. It can include difficulty falling asleep (onset) or staying asleep (maintenance). It is often related to stress and lifestyle. According to Dr. Dinges, it can be successfully treated with Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT).

What is one way to resolve the discrepancy between what infants supposedly know (based on new techniques used by infancy researchers) and how they act (as described by Piaget)?

It's possible that children know more than they demonstrate because they have a hard time inhibiting their typical response. We saw an example of this in the card-sorting task - even though children understand that the rule of the card game has changed, they can't stop themselves from sorting the cards according to the first rule. This inability to inhibit behaviors is thought to be a result of children's underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, the brain area that normally provides us with cognitive control. In fact, adults with damage to the prefrontal cortex often fail a version of the card-sorting task, like children. Children's difficulty inhibiting their typical responses could help explain why they make the A-not-B error, where they continue searching for an object in location A even after the experimenter changes the hiding spot to location B. Even though they sometimes look in the right direction (location B), demonstrating that they actually know where the object is hidden, their behavior doesn't reflect their knowledge. Difficulty inhibiting the typical response would also explain why children fail the water conservation task - they're used to paying attention to the most obvious, familiar cue about water (if it's higher, there's more water), so they have trouble considering a second cue, like the width of the glass.

What does melatonin cause to happen in your blood vessels? Why? What else does melatonin do?

Melatonin is a vasodilator (more blood flow because of larger vessels) which is flooded through the body at night, widening blood vessels near the surface and "dumping heat" making you feel colder at night than during the day. Melatonin (which is released by the pineal gland) helps synchronize the various circadian clocks in your body.

Reduced functioning or injury in the frontal lobe is associated with:

More impulsive and violent behaviors.

When are most of the neurons in your brain made?

Most of the brain's neurons are made in the first 4 months after conception [n.b. after conception, not after birth]. During the 3rd month or so after conception, neuronal development is at its peak pace of constructing half a million neurons per minute. Neurons are generated in the germinal matrix (a structure near the ventricles) and have to migrate to their correct places in the cortex. This process eventually (about 2 months before birth) results in the 6 layers of cortical tissue that you see in the mature brain.

what is the nativists argument

Nature/Nativists argue that what makes us human is our particular genetic makeup; we have different brain structures than other creatures, which gives us "human" capacities.

Piaget found that children younger than 7 years old fail the "3-mountain" task, in which they are shown a diorama of a mountain scene, from one side, and are asked to report what a doll (sitting on the other side) sees. Piaget interpreted this finding to mean that children are egocentric (they cannot put themselves in another person's shoes). Should we agree with Piaget's conclusion? Why or why not? In your justification, describe the findings of a more recent study that uses a simpler version of the "3-mountain" task.

No, we should not agree. The 3-mountain task is difficult because it requires the ability to imagine another's point of view, but ALSO because it is taxing on working memory. It requires the ability to perform mental rotation of objects (difficult). So it could be the case that children fail the 3-mountain task not because of their fundamental egocentricity, but because they are not good at doing many lower-level tasks at once. Research that supports this comes from a study that also tests egocentricity, but is much simpler. Children are presented with cards, and are shown that the card has two different images, one on each side (e.g., a cat on one side and a dog on the other). The child is seated facing a doll, with the card between them, so the child sees one side of the card and the doll sees the other. When a 3-year-old is asked what the doll sees, she reliably reports the correct image. So in this situation (where the task demands are low), the child is able to show her ability to take another's point of view, showing that children are not fundamentally egocentric. That being said, children are more egocentric (in Piaget's sense) than adults. It's a matter of degree. They don't lack the cognitive machinery for computing someone else's perspective. They're just not very good at it, and tend to give up on the effort when things get hard for other reasons.

what is the empiricists argument

Nurture/Empiricists argue that the experience of developing in a particular social/cultural context is what makes us human.

When it comes to people with extraordinary abilities, there are intriguing questions about how much can be attributed to genetic predispositions vs. motivation and deliberate practice. In the case of intelligence, the threshold hypothesis suggests that there is a correlation between IQ and success, but only up to a point- that having additional IQ points beyond this threshold doesn't contribute much to success. (A) Describe the results of a study that does NOT support this hypothesis.

One study examined people who scored in the top 1% on the SAT math section at the age of 13. Within this top 1% of participants, the researchers compared the later-life outcomes of children who were in the top ¼ vs. children who were in the bottom ¼. The threshold hypothesis would predict that the outcomes of these two groups would be similar, since both groups scored extremely well on the SAT math section. Contrary to this prediction, people who were in the top ¼ were much more likely to have obtained various achievements as adults (e.g., having a doctorate, peer-reviewed publications, patents, etc.) than people who were in the bottom ¼ of the top 1%. Thus, this study suggests that in the case of intelligence, certain innate predispositions may be playing a role.

What does Poor fear conditioning imply?

Poor amygdala functioning

In the lecture, Dr. Raine discussed factors during pregnancy that influence fetal development and are associated with more aggressive future conduct of the child. Please describe three of these factors.

Poor nutrition: A study on the relationship between maternal nutrition and antisocial behavior was conducted in the Netherlands. During WWII, many pregnant mothers in the country had poor nutrition because the German army blocked food supplies; about 20,000 people died from consequences of starvation. They were compared to a matched group with normal nutrition consumption.Researchers followed more than 4000 mothers and evaluated their children at age 18. They found that lack of nutrition during pregnancy is associated with risk for developing antisocial personality disorder of the child (Neugebauer et al., 1999) Smoking: In a study, researchers asked pregnant mothers to report the number of cigarettes they smoke daily. Later, they collected the children's arrest histories in adulthood. Other factors including socioeconomic status were controlled. The researchers found that maternal smoking during pregnancy increases the risk for violent behavior in the child. The more cigarettes a mother smokes daily, the more aggressive behavior found in her child (e.g. Brennan et al., 1999). [There is quite a spirited debate in the literature about the causes of this relation.] Alcohol: Some individuals exposed to alcohol prenatally are diagnosed with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS). These individuals often have identifiable, distinctive facial features and suffer from brain damage of various sorts. They also have more delinquent conduct, more police contact in adulthood and are arrested more often (e.g. Streissguth et al., 1996)

Describe two examples that illustrate children's failures to conserve quantity and number (think about the video we watched in lecture of the child being asked about conservation tasks). How did Piaget explain these failures of conservation?

Quantity: The experimenter pours equal amounts of water into two identical cups and asks the child which one has more. The child understands that the two cups contain the same amount of water. The experimenter then pours the water from one of the cups into a taller, thinner cup, and asks the child which of the cups has more water in it. The child points to the taller cup. Number: The experimenter lines up two rows of 10 pennies and asks the child which one has more. The child understands that both rows contain the same number of coins. The experimenter then slides the coins in the top row slightly apart from one another and asks the child which row has more coins in it. The child points to the top row. According to Piaget, children in the preoperational period are only able to focus on one dimension of the situation. For example, they may only pay attention to the height of the water in the cups, instead of also paying attention to the width of the cup. Children are only able to integrate mental representations once they reach the concrete operational period. (Lecture; Textbook p. 302-304). Piaget also attributed failures of conservation to the lack of mental logical operations that would make clear to the child that the amounts have not actually changed - a "logical necessity" given the only superficial changes that are made to the objects (flattening some clay, putting a liquid in a different container).

Explain Raine's Study on Antisocial behavior

Raine has found that omega 3 fatty acids can be useful in reducing the antisocial and aggressive behavior. Children between age 8-16 years were assigned to a treatment condition and a control condition. For a period of 6 months, they received a fruit drink each day. In the treatment condition, omega-3 was added to the drink. The control group received placebo drinks. Only children who took omega-3 displayed reductions in their antisocial and aggressive behavior after the treatment period, indicating the effectiveness of omega-3 (Raine, 2015).

What does REM sleep do for you?

Rapid eye movement (REM) is the time during sleep when we dream, which helps procedural memory and memory consolidation. If you are working on new physical skills, you need REM sleep to make this practice useful and long-lasting ("consolidation"). It also allows us to process emotional memory, keeping the memory of the event but stripping it of the overwhelming qualities.

What were Piaget's 4 stages of development? Give a characteristic feature of each.

Sensorimotor stage (birth to about 18-24 months) - no symbolic reasoning; no distinction between self and the rest of the world; all cognition present and physical; the child has not yet achieved object permanence; at earlier ages, the child fails to reach for hidden objects (until about 8 months), and later makes the A-not-B error (about 8-12 months) Preoperational stage (about 2-7 years old) - no "operations"; fail the conservation tasks; centration (focusing on only one dimension of a problem) Concrete-operational stage (about 7-11 years old) - the child passes conservation tasks and can focus on more than one dimension of a problem, but lacks formal operations (abstract logic) Formal-operational stage (12 years old and older) - the child can reason about abstract and possible/hypothetical things

What is sleep apnea?

Sleep Apnea is the failure of an airway to stay open when asleep. The brain awakens the person when it is alerted to possible oxygen deprivation, preventing good sleep.

What does slow-wave sleep do for you?

Slow wave or non-rapid eye movement is also important for memory processing, especially of memories of what your heard or saw - declarative memories (like facts - recall that declarative memory is the same thing as explicit memory.)

How do Paul Grice's principles of cooperative conversation apply to the following exchange? A: Did your landlord finally get your toilet fixed? B: It looks like I'll be staying in a hotel this weekend.

Speak the truth: A can assume that B is telling the truth about the plan to stay in a hotel, so that concept should affect A's understanding of the answer. Be relevant and be informative: A can assume that B is providing this information as a way of answering the question, that is, B will be staying in a hotel because B's toilet is still broken; this is not some unrelated random fact B has chosen to share. Be clear, brief, unambiguous: This whole utterance is a brief, somewhat humorous way of communicating, "It is not certain yet whether the landlord will have it fixed by the weekend, but so far no progress has been made on my toilet, which is making it really difficult to stay at my house, because access to a functioning bathroom is basically essential." B can be reasonably confident that A will receive the intended message because both A and B are aware of these cooperative principles.

Human development: where does CHANGE come from? (nature and nurture)

The Nature side argues that change comes from maturation over time, i.e., you are born with what you need, and that genetic programming unfolds over time. The Nurture side argues that the change we see in child development comes from learning and experiences.

name two pieces of evidence for this:

The case of Phineas Gage, Brain imaging studies

What does "pruning" refer to in brain development?

The fetus and infant produce far more neurons and synapses than needed by the mature person. Pruning is the process of eliminating the synaptic connections that are not used frequently, which is thought to reflect learning. The time course of pruning throughout development varies by brain region. For example, the frontal lobe reaches its maximum amount of neurons by the time humans are around 12 months old, and this plateaus until about 6 years of age. Then the pruning process begins- humans reach about 65% of their initial amount of frontal lobe neurons by their mid/late teens. Pruning in the frontal lobe occurs relatively late in development compared to other brain regions (like the occipital lobe, where pruning starts and finishes earlier on). Overall, there is a decrease in gray matter that starts in childhood and continues through to early adulthood; there is also an increase in white matter over the course of development (due to increased myelination of axons).

Explain the difference between the concepts of discrete / "digital" and gradient / "analog" as relates to communication. Give an example illustrating each.

The notion of discrete or digital describes "building blocks", units that are categorical, as opposed to continuous. For example, cat and bat have categorically distinct starting sounds and also refer to different things. In this sense words are more like toys made of lego bricks than like, say, recipes where you might stir in arbitrarily varying amounts of the ingredients. On the other hand, the volume of a dog's bark - even if the 'shape' of the bark is the same - might change its meaning from a friendly greeting to a warning. The waggle dance of the honeybee, which uses physical angles to communicate in a gradiated way about continuous physical space, is another example of an analog communication system. Human language is typically "digital," even to the point that we interpret as categorical things that are not actually acoustically distinct by perceptually "undoing" the effects of context on different sounds (as in the examples of complicated coarticulation) and recognizing the meaning of phonetically reduced utterances as identical to their clearly enunciated counterparts. The *ideal* realization of a word involves discrete units (consonants and vowels) that we're trying to uncover; the actual realization, because it's made by a mouth of flesh and blood and therefore has to obey physical constraints, is an analog mush, from which we need to recover the intended discrete components.

Describe the Karpicke & Roediger (2008) study in which subjects had to learn English translations for Swahili words. What do its results tell us?

The task was to learn 40 Swahili words: there were 4 groups of subjects, each using a different study strategy during the training period. All groups started by learning the words in a short training session. Then later, the first group (Group 1) studied all 40 words, and then were tested on all 40 words. The second group (Group 2) only studied the words they had previously gotten wrong, and then were tested on all 40 words. The third group (Group 3) studied all 40 words, but were only tested on prior wrong answers. The fourth group (Group 4) studied only prior wrong answers, and were only tested on prior wrong answers. A week after this training, the groups were given a final test on the words. Groups 1 and 2 showed similarly good performance on the test (about 80% correct). On the other hand, Groups 3 and 4 performed poorly on the test. These results demonstrate the importance of testing yourself: both Groups 3 and 4 were only tested on prior wrong answers during the training period, while Groups 1 and 2 were tested on all 40 words during the training period. These results also suggest that it is possible to study efficiently in certain ways, i.e., it is okay to save some time by only studying prior wrong answers (focus on the things you don't know yet), as long as you continue to test yourself on all of the material. This was the study strategy used by Group 2, which performed just as well as Group 1, even though Group 1 spent time studying all 40 words and were tested on all 40 words.

What about the people who can perform genius-like tasks, like amazing feats of mathematical calculation? What explanation can we offer for their ability?

There are many examples of people with amazing talents. One woman could multiply two 13-digit numbers in her head, for example. Although it might seem that she holds special, innate skills, the reality is that she built her skills through practice. Her IQ was normal and she was not particularly special when it came to any other cognitive tasks outside of the math domain. Rather, she had the motivation to put incredible effort into practicing and improving at these mathematical feats. This appears to be typical of many people who do extreme math calculations or huge short-term memory feats. (This being said, this characterization is not necessarily appropriate for other extreme talents.)

In class, Professor Swingley talked about research that used eye-tracking to record where participants' eyes went when they heard the beginning of a statement like, "I wanted a tur..." He also gave some examples of hallucinatory word-finding in backwards musical recordings. What important feature of language processing do these examples demonstrate in common?

These examples both demonstrate top-down processing; participants in the eye-tracking study began looking at objects whose names begin with the initial sound even before the utterance was complete, showing anticipatory inference of how the sentence will end. In the case of the hallucinatory word-finding, without the guide of the suggested words being provided, few people could hear discernible words in the garbled backwards song - indicating that bottom-up processing wasn't sufficient to form a meaningful interpretation. However, once some words were suggested, most of the class was able to impose that preconception on the sounds and 'hear' that message.

What part of the brain is reduced in psyschopaths?

These individuals tend to have reduced volume and functioning in their amygdala compared to normal people.

How do psychopaths often respond to moral questions?

They sometimes provide similar answers to moral judgment questions, compared to non-psychopaths These findings indicate that psychopaths may know the difference from right to wrong, but their feeling of wrongness is impaired

What is the spacing effect in memory?

This is the technique of spacing out your studying over time, rather than concentrating all of your studying at one time point (which is what happens in the case of cramming). There are hundreds of studies of this phenomenon. In one example Sobel et al. (2011) examined this studying technique in fifth graders. Half of the subjects studied new words twice on day one and were tested in five weeks. This was the "massed" exposure condition. The other half studied once on day one, one more time one week later, and then were tested five weeks after that. This was the "spaced" exposure condition. Those who were in the spaced exposure condition achieved much higher scores on the test, even though they were tested 6 weeks after first learning the words. The advantage of spaced over massed exposure is one of the strongest, most consistent results in psychology.

Describe two errors children usually make in Piaget's sensorimotor stage and the reasons Piaget provided for these behaviors.

When children are in the sensorimotor stage, they don't search for objects once they are out of sight. Piaget explained this behavior as a lack of object permanence -- the child believes that the object only exists in relation to her own perceptual experience; once the object is out of sight, it no longer exists. Children also make the A-not-B error during the sensorimotor stage (after they have started reaching for hidden objects). In the A-not-B error, they continue to reach for a toy in an initial hiding place (A) after the hiding place changes to another location (B) on a new trial, even though they watched the adult change the hiding place. Piaget explained this behavior as the child being unable to separate the world from his own actions and movements. The child's reaching behavior defines his experience of the object, so he continues to reach toward the same hiding place to access it. The child can't conceptualize the object apart from his experience reaching for it. These explanations come from Piaget's belief that in the sensorimotor stage, cognition is purely physical (based on movements and sensory information). In this stage, Piaget believed that children cannot think about the past or future, cannot differentiate between themselves and the world (they believe that the world is a product of their own movements and perceptions), and lack object permanence. (Note though that Piaget's explanations for these very real behavioral phenomena are no longer believed by most psychologists.)

How does the concept from question number 1 relate to the practice of "incremental parsing"?

When we hear a phrase like, "The fat people eat..." we begin to parse the sentence grammatically before we have all of the pieces, assuming that fat is an adjective modifying people, which we think is the subject, and eat is the verb. These are all inferences that are informed in a top-down way based on our statistical knowledge of the language; when we hear the unexpected end of the sentence ("...accumulates on their thighs") we must re-parse it to reflect a grammatically valid role for all of the words.

Can infants learn before birth? (i.e., can fetuses learn?) Can you give an example?

Yes, they can. We know this from studies that show that infants' preferences are shaped by their prenatal experiences. Preferences for tastes: Pregnant women ate an increased amount of carrots during their third trimester; later, it was found that their 6-month-old babies liked carroty cereal more (they frowned less and ate more of it), compared to infants whose mothers hadn't eaten lots of carrots. (Mennella, Jagnow, & Beauchamp 2001) Preferences for sounds: Infants were found to prefer the theme music of a TV show their mothers watched frequently while pregnant, compared to the theme music of other TV shows (likewise with certain poems that were read aloud frequently during pregnancy). Newborns also prefer the sound of their own mother's voice over other women's voices.

what are people who believe in nurture called

empiricists

Results of healthy sleep:

mentally fast and accurate, stable attention and good focus, good memory (recall and working memory), sound executive decision making, new insights and creative solutions, less risk taking behavior, emotionally steady, realistic optimism. Basically all the things you want and hope for from your brain!

Results of poor sleep:

mentally slow and inaccurate, variable attention and poor focus, unreliable memory, weak executive decision making, poor insight, high risk behaviors, emotionally unpredictable, feelings tired/stressed/exhausted, pessimism. All the things you hope you can avoid your brain doing!

what are people who believe in nature called

nativists

Charicteristics of Psychopaths

often cold-blooded, lack fear/conscious/shame, and may involve in more calculated aggression

Homicide mortality rate is negatively correlated with:

seafood consumption across countries, suggesting (weakly, it's just a correlation) that something in fish might dampen violent behavior.