cognitive final exam

Recognize examples illustrating people's insensitivity to sample size when reasoning about a population from a sample.

'law of large numbers' statisticians say the larger sample you consider, the more resemblance will be between the properties of the sample and the properties of the population at large. people think this goes the same for small samples, but it does not.

contra laterality

-left hemisphere receives signals from and sends signals to the opposite side of the body -sensations, motor activates -left half of both eyes

brain activity underlying perceptual processes

-theres brain activity that responds to the color, different that responds to location, different activity that responds to shape à yet we perceive it as one object that has all these characteristics even though theres so many parts of the brain doing different jobs at once -they have not found any one place that all the information comes together

Describe the factors, besides the actual frequency of occurrence, that influence how easily we remember instances of something occurring.

1. the experimenters request: ex) asking for 12 instances of when you were aggressive is hard, so you say overall you arent an aggressive person. --> asking for 6 instances however is easy, so you assume you are an aggressive person 2. media coverage and exposure growing up. -->more likely to think people die from motor cycle accidents than stomach cancer

Explain the concept of an evolved ability to check for cheaters (social contract theory) to explain the performance on the Wason task.

Difficulty applying logic to abstract material because it doesn't relate to something, we evolved our brains to work with social relations. Checking for cheaters- frame the 4 card selection task, its very easy -if we allow ourselves to be cheated, we won't do as well

prototype theories of categorization

One way you can characterize your mental representation of a category, say you have all these instances that you put into a category -you've seen a bunch of dogs in your life, but you have an 'average dog' in your mind ex) chocolate lab/Charlie looking dog

LTM vs STM

STM: -working memory -limited capactiy and duration - cant hold much and cant hold for very long -7 unrelated items -access is fast and easy LTM: -large capacity &duration -unaware until needed -access if more difficult -best if theres a lot of meaningful connections

depth of processing

Says memory is better for material that has been processed more deeply Define what is deeper processing? à leads to better memory (useless reasoning) must have independent definition to what deep processing is à encoding meaning vs sound and appearance à elaborative rehearsal vs rehearsal

Describe the evidence regarding whether knowing that an "anchor" was randomly chosen affects people's use of the anchoring and adjustment heuristic.

When judgement errors arise for other reasons, anchoring serves to cement them into place . exx) trying to judge whether death by homicide or death by diabetes is is more frequent. since we know homicides tend to be front news page, we are aware of the bias and aware of how it may shaped our initial estimate, you might seek to adjust that estimate

results from dichotic listening tasks

a person has on headphones and there is the attended channel and the unattended channel. it would be able to study selective and divided attention.

Define "problem space".

a problem space is the set of all states--options-- that can be reached in solving a problem. aka the path through the space, leading, stepbystep, from the initial state to the goal state. this would be extremely difficult to navigate through because it is so vast. we would have to look at every single option ex) in a game of chess , to decide whats the best move. theres thousands of options!! too long to go through each, so we need a problem solving heuristic(efficient strategy)

Define and recognize examples of deductive reasoning.

a process through which we start with claims or assertions that we count as given and ask what follows from these premises ex) -youre convinced red wine gives you headaches - relationships based off of physical attraction dont last allows us to make predictions about upcoming events

Define confirmation bias and recognize examples.

a tendency to be more alert and more responsive to evidence that confirms ones beliefs rather than evidence that might challenge ones beliefs. ex) you have a belief a big dog is vicious. confirmation will make you believe that big dogs are vicious whenever you see them and little dogs are friendly whenever you see them. your memory schemata will help you remember episodes that make you believe this.

Describe how availability and confirmation bias affect judgments of covariation.

because of our tendency to be more responsive to things that confirm our already existing belief (confirmation bias) there is already a biased sample of dogs available . if youre asked to estimate covariation between dog size and temperament, youll probably overestimate. its because the bias lies in our data, which is our judgement

behaviorism

behaviorism is observing and studing behaviors to be able to have science and data to back up ideas. this was pretty sucessful, but lots of behavior could not be explained the way behaviorists thought it could be. it is not how they behave in response to the stimulus, its how they understand or interpret the stimulus.

Recognize examples of people's tendency to disregard and to forget disconfirming evidence.

belief perserverance. this is a phenomenon in which disconfirming evidence is undeniable and in plain view, people still do not use it.

bottom up processing

bottom up (data driven) comes from how the incoming information triggers a response to senses and transduces the stimuli to a neural signal.

Explain the methods of "collecting verbal protocols" and "computer simulation" for examining the nature of problem solving.

by collecting verbal protocols of a person speaking out loud of each step they take, we can identify some of the strategies that these problem solvers rely on. ex) hill climbing strategy subproblems: breaking it into smaller goals working backward from the goals

Explain the effect of neglecting the base rate on using diagnostic information.

causes problems. for example, someone who is insensitive to base rates will be inept in judging covariation (innaccurate whenever trying to figure out cause and effect relationships)

Describe the evidence about the effect of expert knowledge on seeing illusory covariations.

clinicians are caught by the same illusion that lab participants are-- ex) they believed in rorshach inkblots that people who are gay tend to see butts , but this is simply not true experts see a lot of people throughout their job and get a lot of experience, therefore theyre capable of projecting their beliefs onto the evidence and perceiving patterns that arent there

Explain how Newell and Simon, as well as other problem solving researchers view the process of problem solving as a search through the problem space.

comparing the current state and the goal state gives you smaller goals and subproblems that are among the problem space. if highlights the differences between where you are and want to be. you can also work backwards from your goals that can help.

Recognize examples of conditional reasoning.

conditional statements are statements of the familiar "if x then y" format. first statement provides a condition under which the second is guaranteed to be true.

Explain the weakness of confirming evidence compared to disconfirming evidence.

confirming evidence can be confirmed many times and still be false - ex) a rooster can crow every morning and believe the sun comes up because of it. obviously thats not true disconfirmations however are more informative- ex) rooster decided to not crow one morning. the sun would still rise and disconfirm the roosters expectectation more

Describe and give examples of diagnostic information.

diagnostic information is information that does indeed indicate that a person is in one category rather than another --! brief descriptions of the individuals ex) engineer: someone that likes sailling, and mathematical puzzles with no interest in political views even if 90% of chinese scholars fit a discription and only 5% of psychologists fit the discription, it doesnt matter about the percentage it matters about the number. ex 90% of a small number of chinese scholars is smaller than 5% of psychologists

Describe how cognitive scientists study what consciousness seems to be needed for.

do you need consciousness for every behavior? no- ex) doing daily routine, study neurological paths

encoding specificity

ex) participants read target words (piano) in either two contexts: "The man lifted the piano" or "the man tuned the paino" . these led participants to thing about the target in a specific way and it was this thought that encoded the memory-- "either "piano is heavy" or "piano as a musical instrument".they were later asked to recall the targer words. those who had seen the 'lifted' sentence were more likely to recall the word if someone hinted "it was something heavy" over "it has a nice sound" and vice versa.

Define the "gambler's fallacy"

ex) the belief that if a coin was flipped on heads 6 times in a row that it is more likely to be tails next time. logic that leads this is that if the coin is fair, then a series of tosses should contain equal numbers of heads and tails. if no tails have come up for a while, then its 'overdue'.

Define "transfer".

ex)) Training rats to run a maze, calculating number of errors they make "Unpretrained" - get there at a certain time, Trained rats are transferring some knowledge to the next maze The savings is a way to measure how much transfer is occurring -want to compare a week delay between training a test to a month delay, the savings may be bigger

Describe the differences between expert and novice problem solvers.

expert problem solvers: think about problems in terms of their deep structure, not superficially , more attentive to the structure, use analogies , using subgoals to aim at the problems ultimate goal novice: think about problems superficially

history of psychology

first psychologists were actually philosophers who decided that the mind could be studied scientifically -prior to taking on that task, anything physical was done by scientists -anything mental was considered philosophy -said they wanted to scientifically study the mind -tried to study consciousness à been struggling with it -if we apply scientific method to the mind perhaps, we can study the mind à introspection -introspection didn't work because we can't actually get into someone's mind and confirm it -sigmund freud: methods of therapy for treating neurological disorders that you couldn't find a physical cause. Developed psychodynamic theory -some psychologists were studying psychodynamic, go to institutes where psychanalysis was taught à engage in therapy where they use that, not very scientific at all - psychologists said since the mind is not physical, we should not be trying to study the mind, rather behavior and how they're related to external stimuli (Watson and skinner) - ^^ working with nonhuman animals, behaviorists - said they apply just as well to humans as it did animals -humanistic approach: denied importance of the scientific method à said we should just deal with peoples feelings, make them have a good self image, etc. -^^ some success in personality problems -cognitive approach: cant deny that theres mental activity going on, with computer and information science, they found ways to deal with the nonphysical of psychology

Explain Wason's study in which he asked people to find the general rule for the numbers 2, 4, and 6.

he presented 2, 4, 6 to research participants. the participants were told that the trio of numbers conformed to a specific rule and they had to figure out what the rule was. they were allowed to ask "do these 3 numbers follow the rule?" and they were said yes or no. the answer was that the numbers had to be bigger than the previous --> 4, 12, 287 or 1, 3, 5 had a very hard time discovering the rule requests for disconfirmation were relatively rare, those that did ask were more likely to discover the rule . confirmation bias was strongly on the scene in this experiment

Distinguish between a heuristic and an algorithm.

heuristics are a rule of thumb, set of procedures, fast/easy, **probably** going to give you the right answer algorithms can lead you to this, its a path/ pattern, ex) if you follow a certain pattern in tic tac toe its impossible for the opponent to win however, algorithms can be so burdensome and long people just go to heuristics

Explain what makes one problem a good analogy for another problem.

if the two problems are similar in their particulars

Distinguish between a well defined and an ill-defined problem.

ill defined problems have no clear statement on how the goal should be reached or what steps one may need to take to get them. ex) wanting world peace experts can solve these ill defined problems by created well defined subgoals or subproblems well defined problems have a clearly specified goal state and eventually with a managable set of operaters to try

Describe and recognize examples of the anchoring and adjustment heuristic.

in many situations, we dont know the answer to a particular question but we do know the ballpark. we can use the initial idea as an 'anchor' and reach our answer by making suitable adjustment to that anchor -problem is we usually adjust too little so we're more influenced by the initial anchor than we should be

Distinguish between inductive and deductive reasoning.

inductive: -look at many particular cases and try to draw a generall rule -weakness: cant prove a general rule -its like youre looking at a sample. you havent looked at every single case deductive: -general premises to a particular conclusion "if this, then that" -weakness: assume this premise to be true

Describe the kinds of conclusions that can be drawn from inductive reasoning versus deductive reasoning.

inductive: general conclusion about a whole set deductive: particular conclusion

Define and recognize examples of: problem elements, states, operators, and constraints.

initial state: the knowledge and resources you have at the outset. goal state: what you work toward operators: tools or actions that can change current state to get from initial state to the goal state path constraints: form of resource limitations like limited time or money, other limits like ethical limits on what you can do, etc

intentional vs incidental learning

intentional versus incidental learning. incidental learning is learning in the absence of an intention to learn. intentional learning is when they are knowingly going to be tested on material, so they intentionally learn it. someone who intends to learn will select the strategy they think is best which will affect quality of performance. effects of this coding is indirect. intention to learn leads people to approach materials in a certain fashion

Describe the Framing Effect.

it depends on how the question is framed. if a problem is framed positively 1. if Program A is adopted, 200 people will be saved 2. if program B is adopted, there is a 1/3 probablitiy 600 people will be saved, and 2/3 probablility that no people will be saved people prefer A. if its framed negatively 1. if program A is adopted, 400 people will die 2. if program B is adopted, 1/3 probablitiy no one will die, 2/3 probability 600 people will die people prefer B. even though (1 and 1) & (2 and 2) are actually the same thing on each situation, participants will switch up the way they answer based on the positive or negative framing of the question risk seeking: willing to gamble in hopes of avoiding or reducing the loss risk averse: not risk seeking, refuse to gamble

State the set of normative rules that apply to inductive reasoning.

logic, statistics, law of large numbers

maintenance rehearsal vs elaboritive rehearsal

maintenence rehearsal is repeat due to sound over and overelaborative rehearsal is to find a way to make meaning out of a set of numbers in long term memory

semantics

meanings of individual words

State whether a logical statement can be modeled by only one mental model, or more than one.

mental model approach leads to a number of predictions about reasoning performance. some of these premises can be modeled in more than one way, therefore they will have to examine multiple models

Define "modus ponens" and "modus tollens".

modus ponens: justifies conclusions in this case: if p is true, then q is true. p is true. therefore, q must be true. if luke waves at me, ill be happy. luke did wave at me." modus tollens: justifies conflusions in this case: if p is true, then q is true. q is false. therefore, p must be false.

Describe an algorithmic search through a problem space.

most people get this wrong if they do a algebraic solution, but they get the problem right when they start by visualising the arrangement, with this done they can discern the actual positions of the worms starting point and the end point

Distinguish between a normative account and a descriptive account.

normative: people should use logic.. stats.. law of large numbers. instead they use descriptive accoun: is telling us how the process ordinarily proceeds while the normative account tells us how things ought to go. what people REALLY do and what leads to systematic errors

Describe people's ability to notice a useful analogy to an unfamiliar problem.

people fail to use them if spontaneous, if instructed they use them suitably and very good actually

Describe examples of evidence about the effect of the presence of diagnostic information.

people seem to turn this question "is tom a lawyer or engineer" about category membership into a question about resemblance (rely on representativeness heuristic). so they ask themselves how much tom RESEMBLES their idea of a lawyer.

Explain how people use mental models to reason about syllogisms.

people sometimes may not rely on rules rooted in our evolutionary past, or rules induced from pragmatic experience, or rules of any sort. instead, they may try to reason by thinking about concrete and specific cases. mental models are the little pictures of circles you make to try to understand syllogisms. they first construct a mental model of a problem (or multiple). they then scrutinize it, trying to discover what conclusions follow the modeled premises. they then check the premises but not with the proposed conclusion

Recognize the effect of knowing that an instance in not typical on people's judgments about the population from this instance.

people tend to make the mistake that an individual represents the entire group (opposite of representativeness heuristic) even when they are told it is not. ex) prison guards, even though they were told they are Atypical of the prison population, they still believed majority of officers were similar to him. ex) "man who" arguments

Explain the studies of Ross et al. (subjects told they were above or below average in discriminating fake from authentic suicide notes) in which people demonstrated belief perseverance.

people were told to try to discriminate real from fake suicide notes. they were given predetermined responses to tell whether they were good or not good at it. even though they were they were good or they were bad was predetermined, it still impacted the way they believed they did. they perserved in their beliefs even when the basis for the belief had been completely discredited.

Explain the evidence for the effects of pragmatic reasoning schemas (permission schema) on the Wason task.

pragmatic reasoning schemas are rules that are learned from day to day experience. people learn experience that certain rules apply to any situation that involves permission (if one wished to take a certain action, they must have permission) also for other cases like obligations or cause and effect relationships the letter and number example is unlikely to evoke a reasoning schema because there is no practical or meaningful relations ex) entering and cholera. "if a passanger wishes to enter the country, he or she must first receive a cholera inoculation"

recall vs recognition

recall means we're presented with some cue that broadly identifies the info that we seek, but we need to come up with this information on our own. ex) open ended test. more likely if during the original learning you thought about relationships between the materials to be remembered// memory connectionsrecognition test means the information is presented to us and we must decide whether its the sought after information or not. ex) multiple choice test. "yes i saw this before"-- recall the earlier episode

Define start state, goal state, and intermediate states.

start state is the initial state you begin at, goal state is where you want to end up, intermediate states are every state between that and the goal state.

syntax

structure of the sentence/way words are organized/word forms

pragmatics

surrounding context

Describe how the gambler's fallacy is related to the representativeness heuristic.

the explanation lies in our assumption of category homogeneity. we know over the long haul, the number of tails vs heads would be quite similar 50/50. so we think 'all tosses' have this property of 50/50. our assumption leads us to expect any representative of the category will also have this property.

Explain the effect of logical statements that can be modeled in more than one way on the ease or difficulty of reasoning about the statement.

the greater number of models needed in reasoning through the problem, the more likely errors are to occur. expected value=probablility of the particular outcome x utility of the outcome reason based choice: one we feel good about and decisions that feel justified. we do reason based choice when we make a decision when we see compelling reasons for that decision.

Define "base rate"

the overall likelihood that a particular case will be in this category or that one, independent of the diagnostic information often expressed as probablitiy or a percentage !! chinese scholars out of psychologists. 4.8 = 10,000 chinese scholars/ 210,000 --> total base info example: 70 lawyers, 30 engineers----> 70% are lawyers

Describe the evidence about the effects of prior beliefs on judgments of covariation.

theory - prior belief: judgements are often extravagent. they do not judge the objective facts very well. 1. the evidence people consider rather than the process itself. in making these judgements, people consider only a subset of the evidence and its a subset thats shaped by their prior expectations.

Explain why an algorithmic search through the problem space is not a feasible method for solving most problems.

there is too many states to all possibly be reviewed and compared

Recognize examples of categorical syllogisms.

these are a type of logical argument that begins with two assertions (problems premises- each containing a statement about a category) all p are m. all s are m. therefore, all s are p. this is INVALID syllogism.

Describe the factors uncovered by Gick and Holyoak that facilitate people's ability to notice and use an analogy to solve an unfamiliar problem.

they will use analogies if the previous problem had the same subject ex) hobbits and hobbits similarities between the current problem and previously studied also help people go past the superficial features of the problem but instead think of the principles governing the problem if they figure out how to map the prior case onto the problem now being solved we could encourage people to pay attention to the deep structure from the very start, rather than attending to the problems superficial content -- help mapping on to another

Describe some of the effects of content on performance on the Wason four card task.

this data provides another argument against the proposal that logic describes the rules of thought. logic depends only on the form or syntax of the assertions being considered, and not at all on the content, performance is marked differently between the letter and number example vs the beer example. this is because logic does not matter, but the content of the problem does.

Describe and recognize examples of people's tendency towards "confirmation bias".

this is a strong tendency to seek out confirming evidence to rely on that evidence in drawing their conclusions ex) when people are assessing a belief or hypothesis theyre more likely to seek evidence that confirms the belief than evidence that may disconfirm it also, when disconfirming evidence is available, people often fail to use it in adjusting their beliefs

Explain the evidence for the effects of familiarity on Wason task.

this is because evolutionary perspective on psychology. our ancestors never needed to reason about vowels and numbers. they had to worry about things such as issues of betrayal and certain situations.

Define and recognize examples of the availability heuristic

this is the reliance on availablitiy as a substitute for frequency. for example, if you are trying to figure out if you are going to do well in chemistry, you start to think about if your friends did well in chemistry before. if you can think quickly of friends that did good, youre more likely to take it. if you think of friends but it takes you a little while, youre less likely to do good. ex) do more words start with the letter R , or are there more words with R as the third letter? --> people would say start, but its actually the third letter. bc thats more common to us.

Describe and recognize examples of the representativeness heuristic.

this is when you use resemblance in place of information about category membership. for example, youre trying to judge whether david is lying to you or not. as one option, you try to remember everything you know about david and everything you know about liars, see if david fits the category of a liar. or instead of trying to judge davids category membership, you think about whether david resembles your notion of a typical liar. if he does, you judge him to be a liar. this assumption leads us to draw conclusions like: if youve seen one lawyer, youve seen them all because each member of the group is representative of the group.

Describe the Wason four card selection task, and the typical results obtained with it.

this is where participants are shown with four playing cards. theyre told each card has a number on one side and a letter on the other. "if a card has a vowel on one side, it must have an even number on the other side". which cards must be turned over to put this rule to the test?? A6J7 A vowel and an odd number 46% wrongly did A and 6 33% wrongly just did A correct answer: A and 7

Define "illusory covariation" and give examples.

this is where the clinicians see a pattern that is not really there, they are caught by an illusion. the covariations students and clinicians would find were illusory--observed in the data although it was simply not actually there ex)buttox=homosexual in rorschach inkblots ex) people thinking you can determine weather by arthiritis pain

top down processing

top down (concept driven) is based off of previous knowledge and expectations, and basing stimuli off of those expectations priming (being predisposed to something in an experiment and being more familiar with that)an indivudal knows a monkeys combination of frequencies, so when they hear this combination, they perceive the noise as a monkey.

Define and recognize examples of inductive reasoning.

try to go beyond the available information-- drawing inferences about a pattern based on a few examples, or making projections about novel cases based on what youve seen so far. never guaranteed to be true.

Name the heuristics that people use to make inductive judgments.

we know that jdugement often relies on shortcut strategies such as the representativeness heuristic. deciision making relies on judegement and representativeness. participants seem to focus on a small number of representative moments within an experience (ex-- a week in rome in 1 or 2 pictures) mental snapshots may not be representative of the actual time. therefore its a bad representation of the whole trip

Explain the effect of the presence of diagnostic information on people's tendency to neglect the base rate.

when both diagnostic and base rate information is given, participants ignore base rate and rely only on diagnostic information. ex) the participants only based their information on diagnostic info (the stereotype of the person) even when base rates were switched

Describe a typical method for measuring transfer.

when one has gone through training vs. when one wasnt. amount of time it takes for someone WITHOUT training to get to the criterion vs the amount of time it takes someone WITH training to get to the criterion.

Recognize examples of people's tendency to fail to consider alternative hypotheses.

when people encounter evidence that fits with their views, they tend to accept it at face value when people encounter disconfirming evidence, theyre skeptical about it and try to reinterpret it so it doesnt challenge the beliefs. for example) placing bets on a football game. the person would consider wins as 'wins' and losses as 'near wins'.

Define covariation and give examples of how judging covariation is involved in many everyday judgments.

x and y 'covary' if x tends to be on the scene when ever y is, and x tends to be absent whenever y is absent. for example, exercise and stamina covary, people who do the first tend to have a lot of the second. covariation can be strong or weak/ positive or negative