Cog Sci final
Which of the following is an example of the availability heuristic?
Anything that relates to human judgment and what is available in our mind right then and there
Why is inhibition important in decision-making networks?
they help insure that only one of the options is chosen so deadlock does not occur
What makes a model of decision making a traditional rational model?
It stems from proper mathematical thinking and logical processes
The Pirahã language is considered a challenge to Chomsky's theory of language because:
They don't have the same basic language patterns as us: unique grammar usage, therefore language is not inherent
This semester, you learned that German students are generally more accurate at identifying the larger city from a list of pairs of U.S. cities than American students are, and vice versa for American students and German cities. Which of the following explanations for this finding best fits the perspective of ecological rationality?
They used the recognition heuristic, and the recognition heuristic works because people talk about "big" things more than "small things" but the recognition heuristic only works if you only know one of the options. Americans knew about both cities in America but they only recognized one of the two cities in Germany, the larger city and vice versa with the Germans.
In the Ultimatum Game, which of the following best describes the behavior of typical American subjects?
US subjects tend to offer a lot more than their counterparts resulting in a more fair game
In which circumstance does the recognition heuristic, tend to work well?
When people talk about big things more than small things
What does it mean to claim that humans exhibit bounded rationality?
• Human memory, cognitive capacity, and time are limited • Most real world problems cannot be solve optimally in a reasonable amount of time • The only plausible/possible approach is to use methods: shortcuts, rules of thumb, or heuristics
When is the representativeness heuristic used?
• Used when making judgments about the probability of an event under uncertainty • "Rules of thumb"
Why do these authors reject the idea that most of our behavior is the product of general purpose programs?
•Language learning is caused by programs that are specialized for performing this task, proving our circuits are specialized.
When asked to give quantity labels, the Pirahã differed in the absolute quantity associated with each label depending on whether the quantities were presented in an increasing or decreasing order. Which of the following cognitive biases might explain this observation?
anchoring adjustment bias
Color-grapheme synesthesia would enhance performance in which of the following perceptual tasks?
anything involving Colors and numbers
Identify which of the following things from experiments covered since the midterm were directly measured:
anything that is measuring exactly what you're looking to measure
"Theory of mind" refers to...
"Attributing mental states to — beliefs , intents , desires , pretending , knowledge , etc. — to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires, intentions, and perspectives that are different from one's own."
Which of the following best describes typical human decision making with respect to choices involving financial gains and losses?
- Cognitive framing - Risk takers for gains - Risk averse for loss
Both the "Heuristics and Biases" approach of Tversky and Kahneman and the "Ecological Rationality" approach of Todd and Gigerenzer emphasize the importance of heuristics in human decision-making, but the two approaches differ substantially in their evaluation of heuristics. Which of the following statements best characterizes this difference?
- Delving downwards, we need to expand our understanding of the set of building blocks and deepen evolved abilities (e.g. the capacities for recognition or for trust) that can combine to create decision mechanisms - Connecting upwards, it is necessary to consider how the adaptive toolbox of heuristics for inference and preference ties in with other cognitive memory, perceptual and motor systems to produce adaptive behavior (as has been done in implementing recognition heuristic with a broader cognitive modeling framework)
What are the aims of evolutionary psychology?
- Discover and understand the design of the human mind - Natural competence - How far back in evolutionary time do we need to go to understand human cognition? - Maladapted aspects of human cognition, such as reasoning errors, visual illusions, overeating, etc.
In the perceptual discrimination task investigated by these authors, what behavioral evidence supports the claim that rats possess metacognitive abilities?
- Experiment: rats trained to associate two levers with two different sounds - one for long sounds and one for short sounds. If they press correctly they get 6 food pellets; if wrong, none. They could also not participate and get 4 pellets. - On easy tests, rats frequently presses levers and gambled. on harder tests (medium length sounds) rats skipped gambling and went straight for the 4 pellets. - To confirm rats skipped because they knew they'd get it wrong, researchers removed the 4 pellet option and rats performed terribly.
These authors wrote, "Our neural circuits were designed by natural selection to solve problems that our ancestors faced during our species' evolutionary history." Among the examples of cognitive challenges they discuss, what we are designed to solve?
- Generally speaking, adaptive problems are problems that come up again and again during the evolutionary history of a species, and they are problems whose solution affected the reproduction of individual organisms I. Knowing what organisms consider it prey, Knowing what is safe to eat II. Who to socialize with, how to communicate III. Who to mate with, Finding the right mate
Which of the following is an example of anchoring and adjustment?
- If asked whether the population of Turkey was greater or less than 30 million, you might give one or other answer. If then asked what you thought the actual population was, you would very likely guess somewhere around 30 million, because you have been anchored by the previous answer. - Starting with the unimpicitely suggested reference point (anchor) and making adjustments to reach an estimate; It influences the way people intuitively assess probabilities;
Exploration and exploitation refer to two phases of a search process. Which description below most generally describes the type of environment where more time should be spent *exploiting* than exploring? and vice versa
- If you have recently found resources where you are stay near by (it) - If it has been a while since you've found resources expand your search to larger area (re)
Which of the following best describes how subjects from Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic (WIERD) populations lie relative to the range of human cognitive variation?
- It is very small compared to most of the world but they are almost always used for studies - It is a more individualistic culture
Which of the following experiments, a video of which was shown in class, is used to assess whether young children understand the concept of conservation?
- Pouring equal amount of liquid into different shaped glass (taller has more) - the spacing of the quarters (quarters placed further away means more quarters) - the amount of graham crackers (one being split into two is as fair as getting two whole ones)
Which of the following is an example of cognitive framing?
- Reacting to a particular choice in a certain way based on how it is being presented. - People rely on an anchor (initial piece of information) when making decisions - Ghandi died before or after x age, - x% of african nations in UN>y, - Miss. river longer or shorter than x,
Which of the following do these authors identify as a consequence of WEIRD subjects' impoverished interaction with the natural world?
- Severely restricted responses - distorting assessments of the typicality of natural kinds in categorization
In what ways are bee swarms like nervous systems?
- The decision making process is a competition between mutually interaction populations of excitable units, - When one population exceeds a threshold level of activity, the corresponding alternative is chosen
These authors ran an experiment using the following description: Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations. What did they find and how did they explain the finding?
- The description of Linda was constructed to be representative of an active feminist (F) and unrepresentative of a bank teller (T) - A group of 88 undergraduates at UBC ranked the eight statements associated with each description by "the degree to which Bill (Linda) resembles the typical member of that class." - Like, similarity and proto-typicality, representativeness depends on both common and distinctive features, it should be enhanced by the addition of shared features
How do WEIRD subjects process visual scenes differently from Asian subjects?
- Westerners engage brain regions associated with object process more than Asians - Asian are less likely to focus on objects within a complex visual scene - Trees in a forest test, Asians see a forest while westerners see individual trees
Which of the following things from experiments covered since the midterm correspond to hidden processes that must be inferred from more measurable things?
- a baby reaching for a thing (M)--> does the baby understand things exist when they're not in sight? (I) - which of two cities is bigger? (m) ---> recognition/availability heuristics (I)
Which of the following best describes the main differences between what these authors call the "classic view of reaching" and their "embodied view" of reaching?
- classic: observing → thinks about it (most emphasized) → acts on the thoughts - embodied: sensing, thinking and acting all happen at the same time and interact with each other
What conclusions were drawn from the results of the several numerical tasks given to the Pirahã people?
- language for exact number is a cultural invention rather than a linguistic universal - that number words do not change our underlying representations of number but instead are a cognitive technology for keeping track of the cardinality of large sets across time, space, and changes in modality
Thomas Hills and colleagues did an experiment to investigate common mechanisms underlying what kinds of tasks?
- spatial foraging task - followed by a repeated scrabble task
What is the "A-not-B" error?
- sticking to the choice due to repetition, even when you see it is not the right answer - A baby will watch an object be placed under blanket A multiple times, until a pattern is set, once the pattern is set the baby will watch an object be placed under blanket B, but what asked where the object is the baby will point to blanket A
"Ecological Rationality" is distinguished from more traditional views of rationality by emphasizing ...
- the circumstances in which the decision is made. - a quick and dirty method of reasoning.
Those of us who are not synaesthetes can trust that synesthesia is a real phenomenon because:
- the pop out effect, - EEG machines
Independent vs. interdependent self-concept was used by these authors to illustrate a contrast between which two kinds of human populations?
Americans (WEIRD) and East Asians
"Massive Modularity" and "Ecological Rationality" represent two different applications of evolutionary thinking to cognitive science that have different views concerning human reasoning and modularity. Which of the following best describes these differences?
ER: takes environment into consideration; norms based on evolution MM: a single organism had multiple function; everything has a job/function
The "size-weight illusion" refers to a situation where, given two objects of equal weight but different sizes, the smaller object will be perceived as heavier. How does Zhu & Bingham's interpretation of the size- weight illusion differ from its traditional interpretation as a case of mistaken perception?
In the Zhu and Bingham interpretation, we are looking at the "throwability" of the object, how far was can afford to throw the object.
What effect did repositioning infants have on their likelihood to commit the so-called A-not-B error?
Infants who reached from the standing position tended to reach correctly (of 20, only 3 reached in wrong direction).
Seeley argues that bee swarms make collective decisions using excitatory and inhibitory mechanisms that are analogous to those used by collections of neurons. Which of the following corresponds to the *inhibitory* mechanism of bee swarms that Seeley describes?
Stop signal in bee swarms serve the same purpose as the *** connections in models of decision making in primate brains, to suppress the activity levels of integrators representing different alternatives
What evidence do these authors provide to support their idea that mental search and spatial search rely on shared brain mechanisms?
Supported by the observation that, across species, similar processes modulate goal directed behaviors and attention in multiple behavioral moduals.
How is the relationship of genes and environment to cognitive architecture described in the evolutionary psychology primer?
The development of architecture is buffered against both genetic and environmental insults, such that it reliably develops across the ancestrally normal range of human environments
The phenomenon of synesthesia supports which of the following conclusions about modularity in the human cognitive architecture?
The idea that the color induction process in grapheme color sensation is a meaningful stimulus to subject to contextual integration processing
Which of the following is an example of metacognition?
The smarties experiment, when a child can open a tube of smarties and expect to find smarties only to find pencils, then the child will be able to accept that another child will not know that pencils are in the smarties tube
Why, according to Ramachandran, is color- grapheme synesthesia the most common kind?
it's an automatic process because colors and shapes are next to each other
Synesthesia is a condition in which...
ordinary perceptual stimuli are accompanied by additional conscious experiences.
Seeley argues that bee swarms make collective decisions using excitatory and inhibitory mechanisms that are analogous to those used by collections of neurons. Which of the following corresponds to the *excitatory* mechanism of bee swarms that Seeley describes?
the Waggle dance because the more excited the bee more rapidly it will waggle
What is the traditional explanation, first offered by Piaget, for why infants commit the A-not-B error?
the error shows that the infants do not understand the perminence of the object
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has a strong version and a weak version. Which of the following best describes the *weak* version?
the language does influence in some way the way we think and view the real world, however, does not fully determine or constrain it
