Cognitive Psych Final

autistic savant syndrome

*In an unusual variant of autism, the individual possesses an extraordinary skill, such as*: -Ability to perform extremely complicated numerical operations -Exceptional musical talents -Ability to solve extremely challenging puzzles -Stephen Wiltshire

Expert problem solvers

- Have a rich store of declarative, procedural, and conditional knowledge - Organize knowledge around general principles and patterns - Work faster, remember relevant information, and monitor progress better than do novices -Attention to deep structure -Reliance on analogies -Break problems into subproblems

Process of Language Acquisition

- Language is acquired by listening and speaking (or watching and signing). - Comprehending what other people communicate - Producing intelligible speech (or signs) - Infants pay attention to what other people say or sign. -children are exquisitely sensitive to patterns and regularities in what they hear, as though each child were an astute statistician, keeping track of the frequency-of-occurrence of this form or that. In one study, 8-month-old infants heard a 2-minute recording that sounded something like "bidakupadotigolabubidaku." These syllables were spoken in a monotonous tone, with no difference in stress from one syllable to the next and no pauses in between the syllables. But there was a pattern. The experimenters had decided in advance to designate the sequence "bidaku" as a word. Therefore, they arranged the sequences so that if the infant heard "bida," then "ku" was sure to follow. For other syllables, there was no such pattern. For instance, "daku" (the end of the nonsense word "bidaku") would sometimes be followed by "go," sometimes by "pa," and so on. The babies reliably detected these patterns. In a subsequent test, babies showed no surprise if they heard the string "bidakubidakubidaku." From the babies' point of view, these were simply repetitions of a word they already knew. However, the babies showed surprise if they were presented with the string "dakupadakupadakupa." This wasn't a "word" they had heard before, although they had heard each of its syllables many times. It seems, then, that the babies had learned the "vocabulary" of this made-up language. -Language has many elements (syntax, semantics, phonology, prosody, etc.), and these elements interact in ordinary language use (so that you rely on a sentence's syntactic form to figure out its meaning; you rely on semantic cues in deciphering the syntax). In the same way, language learning also relies on all these elements in an interacting fashion. For example, children rely on prosody (the rise and fall of pitch, the pattern of timing) as clues to syntax, and adults speaking to children helpfully exaggerate these prosodic signals, easing the children's interpretive burden. Children also rely on their vocabulary, listening for words they already know as clues helping them to process more complex strings.

phonemic restoration effect

-"fill in" missing phonemes based on context of sentence and portion of word presented -researchers start by recording a bit of speech, and then they modify what they've recorded. For example, they might remove the [s] sound in the middle of "legislatures" and replace the [s] with a brief burst of noise. This now-degraded stimulus can then be presented to participants, embedded in a sentence such as The state governors met with their respective legi*latures. participants insist that they heard the complete word, "legislatures," accompanied by a burst of noise-use the context to figure out what the word must have been, but then they insist that they actually heard the word

inferences based on theories

-Inferences about categories are based on typicality and our background knowledge that relates to the concept -However, your inferences are also guided by your broader set of beliefs, and so, once again, we find a role for the "theory" linked to each concept. For example, if told that gazelle's blood contains a certain enzyme, people are willing to conclude that lion's blood contains the same enzyme. However, if told that lion's blood contains the enzyme, people are less willing to conclude that gazelle's blood does too. What's going on here? People find it easy to believe the enzyme can be transmitted from gazelles to lions, because they can easily imagine that lions sometimes eat gazelles; people have a harder time imagining a mechanism that would transmit the enzyme in the reverse direction.

Animal language

-many species do have sophisticated communication systems—including the songs and clicks of dolphins and whales, the dances of honeybees, and the various alarm calls of monkeys. These naturally occurring systems, however, are extremely limited—with small vocabularies and little (or perhaps nothing) that corresponds to the rules of syntax that are evident in human language. These systems will certainly not support the sort of generativity that is a prominent feature of human language—and so these other species don't have anything approaching our capacity to produce or understand an unending variety of new sentences

background knowledge as a Guide to Parsing

-people try to parse sentences in a way that makes sense to them. So, for example, readers are unlikely to misread the headline Drunk Gets Six Months in Violin Case -The moment the person realizes he has misinterpreted the words so far, he'll backtrack and reread the sentence's start, and, with appropriate instruments, we can easily detect these backwards eye movements. Using this technique, investigators have examined the effects of plausibility on readers' interpretations of the words they're seeing

Organization of Language

-there are clear patterns in the way language is structured; knowing the structure is an important part of knowing a language -language relies on well-defined patterns— patterns in how individual words are used, patterns in how words are put together into phrases. I follow those patterns when I express my ideas, and the same patterns guide you in figuring out what I just said. Within each of these levels, people can combine and recombine the units to produce novel utterances— assembling phonemes into brand-new morphemes or assembling words into brand-new phrases. Crucially, though, not all combinations are possible

Wallas' 4 stages of creativity

1. Preparation: gather information and do work on the problem 2. Incubation: sets the problem aside and work on it unconsciously 3. Illumination: a key insight or new idea emerges 4. Verification: confirms that the new idea really does lead to a solution and works out the details -Historical evidence suggests, however, that many creative discoveries don't include the steps Wallas described—or, if they do, they include these steps in a complex, back-and-forth sequence (Weisberg, 1986). Likewise, the moment of illumination celebrated in Wallas's proposal may be more myth than reality. When we examine creative discoveries in science or art, we usually find that the new ideas emerged, not from some glorious and abrupt leap forward, but instead from a succession of "mini-insights," each moving the process forward in some small way

hill-climbing strategy

A commonly used strategy in problem-solving. If people use this strategy, then whenever their efforts toward solving a problem give them a choice, they will choose the option that carries them closer to the goal. Limitations: Some problems require you to briefly move away from your goal to solve the problem from the new position

Analogy

A comparison of two different things that are similar in some way __ is to ___ as __ is to __ To locate helpful analogies in memory, you generally need to look beyond the superficial features of the problem and think instead about the principles governing the problem—focusing on what's sometimes called the problem's "deep structure." Perhaps the people who are better problem solvers are those who make better use of analogies—plausibly, because they pay attention to a problem's deep structure rather than its superficial traits.

Specific Language Impairment (SLI)

A disorder in which children fail to develop language normally even though there are no apparent neurological damages or disorders, no general cognitive impairment or delay, no hearing loss, and no abnormal home environment that would explain this failure. -Children with this disorder have normal intelligence and no problems with the muscle movements needed to produce language. Nonetheless, they are slow to learn language and, throughout their lives, have difficulty in understanding and producing many sentences. They are also impaired on tasks designed to test their linguistic knowledge. They have difficulty, for example, completing passages like this one: "I like to blife. Today I blife. Tomorrow I will blife. Yesterday I did the same thing. Yesterday I ______." -t many authors point to this disorder as evidence for brain mechanisms that are somehow specialized for language learning. Disruption to these mechanisms throws language off track but seems to leave other aspects of the brain's functioning undisturbed.

basic level of categorization

A level of categorization hypothesized as the "natural" and most informative level, neither too specific nor too general. People tend to use basic-level terms (such as "chair," rather than the more general "furniture" or the more specific "armchair") in their ordinary conversation and in their reasoning. In addition, if asked to explain what members of a category have in common with one another, you have an easy time with basic-level categories ("What do all chairs have in common?") but some difficulty with more inclusive (superordinate) categories ("What does all furniture have in common?"

phonological representation

A mental representation of a particular phoneme or sound pattern

The 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.

nine dot problem

A problem involving nine dots, arranged in a square pattern, in which the task is to draw four straight lines that pass through all nine dots without lifting the pen from the paper or retracing a line. People routinely fail to solve this problem, because—according to some interpretations—they (mistakenly) assume that the lines they draw need to stay inside the "square" defined by the dots. In fact, this problem is probably the source of the cliché "You need to think outside the box."

ill-defined problem

A problem lacking clear specification of either the start state, goal state, or the processes for reaching the goal state. Other examples of ill-defined problems include "having a good time while on vacation" and "saving money for college" When confronting ill-defined problems, your best bet is often to create subgoals, because many ill-defined problems have reasonably well-defined parts, and by solving each of these you can move toward solving the overall problem. A different strategy is to add some structure to the problem by including extra constraints or extra assumptions. In this way, the problem becomes well-defined instead of ill-defined—perhaps with a narrower set of options in how you might approach it, but with a clearly specified goal state and, eventually, a manageable set of operations to try.

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.

local representation

A representation in which information is encoded in some small number of identifiable nodes. Local representations are sometimes spoken of as "one idea per node" or "one content per location." Often contrasted with distributed representation.

tree structure

A style of depiction often used to indicate hierarchical relationships, such as the relationships (specified by phrase structure rules) among the words in a phrase or sentence. -You can read the structure from top to bottom, and as you move from one level to the next, you can see that each element (e.g., a noun phrase or a verb phrase) has been "expanded" in a way that's strictly governed by the phrase-structure rules.

rating tasks

A task in which research participants must evaluate some item or category with reference to some dimension, usually expressing their response in terms of some number. For example, participants might be asked to evaluate birds for how typical they are within the category "birds," using a "1" response to indicate "very typical" and a "7" response to indicate "very atypical."

production task

An experimental procedure used in studying concepts, in which the person is asked to name as many examples (e.g., as many fruits) as possible. According to a prototype view, they'll do this task by first locating their bird or dog prototype in memory and then asking themselves what resembles this prototype. In essence, they'll start with the center of the category (the prototype) and work their way outward from there. So birds close to the prototype should be mentioned first; birds farther from the prototype, later on.

sentence verification task

An experimental procedure, used for studying memory, in which participants are given simple sentences (e.g., "Cats are animals") and must respond as quickly as possible whether the sentence is true or false. participants' responses were slower for sentences like "A penguin is a bird" than for sentences like "A robin is a bird"; slower for "An Afghan hound is a dog" than for "A German shepherd is a dog." participants chose their response ("true" or "false") by comparing the thing mentioned (e.g., penguin) to their prototype for that category (i.e., their bird prototype). When there was close similarity between the test case and the prototype, participants could make their decisions quickly; in contrast, judgments about items distant from the prototype took more time

Funes the memorious

Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges describes a character — Funes — who never forgets anything. But rather than being proud of this capacity, Funes is immensely distressed by his memorial prowess: "My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap" (p. 152). Among other problems, Funes complains that he's incapable of think- ing in general terms. He remembers so much about how individuals differ that he has a hard time focusing on what they might have in common

categorization

Categorization enables you to apply your general knowledge (e.g., knowledge about dogs) to new cases you encounter (e.g., Milo). Conversely, categorization enables you to draw broad conclusions from your experience (so that things you learn about Milo can be applied to other dogs you meet). All this is possible, though, only because you realize that Milo is a dog; with- out this simple realization, you wouldn't be able to use your knowledge in this way. But how exactly does this use-of-knowledge proceed?

Mapping

Diagramming main ideas and connections between them. As a related point, you'll be able to use an analogy only if you figure out how to map the prior case onto the problem now being solved — only if you realize, for example, that converging groups of soldiers correspond to converging rays and that a fortress-to-be-captured corresponds to a tumor-to-be-destroyed. This mapping process can be difficult (Holyoak, 2012; Reed, 2017), and failures to figure out the mapping are another reason people regularly fail to find and use analogies.

Your "theories" also affect how quickly you learn new concepts.

Imagine that you're given a group of objects and must decide whether each belongs in Category A or Category B. Category A, you're told, includes objects that are metal, have a regular surface, are of medium size, and are easy to grasp. Category B, in contrast, includes objects that aren't made of metal, have irregular surfaces, and are small and hard to grasp. This sorting task would be difficult—unless we give you another piece of information: namely, that Category A includes objects that could serve as substitutes for a hammer. With this clue, you immediately draw on your other knowledge about hammers, including your understanding of what a hammer is and how it's used. This understanding enables you to see why Category A's features aren't an arbitrary hodgepodge; instead, the features form a coherent package.

family resemblance

In considering the process of categorization, the idea that things in a particular category resemble each other in a number of ways. This approach can be contrasted with the definitional approach, which states that an object belongs to a category only when it meets a definite set of criteria. There are probably no "defining features" for your family — features that every family member has. Nonetheless, there are features that are common in the family, and so, if we consider family members two or three at a time, we can usually find shared attributes. Wittgenstein proposed that ordinary categories like "dog" or "game" or "furniture" work in the same way. There may be no features that are shared by all dogs or all games. Even so, we can identify "characteristic features" for each category—features that many (perhaps most) category members have. Ex Definition for "Game" - could be competition with teams, but some are solo, some with no competition, some fun, some intellectual, some have a clear winner some don't

Anomia

Loss of the ability to name objects, answer simple questions about these objects, or retrieve names of people -specific to certain categories

explanatory theories

More holistic approach to concepts, where we put more emphasis on interrelationships among concepts -each of us has something we can think of as a "theory" about raccoons—what they are, how they act, why they are as they are — and likewise a "theory" about most of the other concepts we hold. The theories are less precise, less elaborate, than a scientist's theory, but they serve the same function. They provide a crucial knowledge base that we rely on in thinking about an object, event, or category; and they enable us to understand new facts we might encounter about the object or category. -also crucial for our discussion of resemblance—guiding your decisions about which features matter in judging resemblance and which ones do not. -You also draw on a "theory" when thinking about new possibilities for a category. For example, could an airplane fly if it were made of wood? What if it were ceramic? How about one made of whipped cream? You immediately reject this last option, because you know that a plane's function depends on its aerodynamic properties, and those depend on the plane's shape.

propositional network

Nodes are connected by associative links. Some of these links are stronger than others. The strength of a link depends on how frequently and recently it has been used. Once a node is activated, the process of spreading activation causes nearby nodes to become activated as well. The model is distinctive, however, in its attempt to represent knowledge in terms of propositions, and the promise of this approach has attracted the support of many researchers.

Different profiles for different concepts

People may think about different concepts in different ways. For example, most people believe that natural kinds (groups of objects that exist naturally in the world, such as bushes or alligators or stones or mountains) are as they are because of forces of nature that are consistent across the years. As a result, the properties of these objects are relatively stable. Thus there are certain properties that a bush must have in order to survive as a bush; certain proper- ties that a stone must have because of its chemical composition. Things are different, though, for artifacts (objects made by human beings). If we wished to make a table with 15 legs rather than 4, or one made of gold, we could do this. The design of tables is up to us; and the same is true for most artifacts.

Collins and Quillian

People use parallel distributive processing to search for relationships between items Tested the prediction that you'll need less time to retrieve knowledge involving closely related ideas, and more time to retrieve knowledge about more distant ideas. Sentence verification task argued that there's no point in storing in memory the fact that cats have hearts and the fact that dogs have hearts and the fact that squirrels have hearts. Instead, they proposed, it would be more efficient just to store the fact that these various creatures are animals, and then the separate fact that animals have hearts-property "has a heart" would be associated with the animals node rather than the nodes for each individual animal, and the same is true for all the other properties of animals

nonfluent aphasia

People with this disorder can understand language they hear but cannot write or speak. In extreme cases, a patient with this disorder cannot utter any words at all. In less severe cases, only a part of the patient's vocabulary is lost, but the patient's speech becomes labored and fragmented

How are stereotypes different from prototypes?

Prototypes are a summary of your experience — and so your prototype for "dog" can be thought of as an average of all the dogs you've seen. Stereotypes, in contrast, are often acquired through social channels — with friends or family, or perhaps public figures, shaping your ideas about what "lawyers" are like, or "Canadians," or "Italians." In addition, stereotypes often include an emotional or evaluative dimension, with the result that there are groups you're afraid of, groups you respect, groups you sneer at. -stereotypes can serve the same cognitive function as prototypes

exemplar-based reasoning

Reasoning that draws on knowledge about specific category members, rather than drawing on prototypes or more-general information about the overall category. similar to the prototype view. According to each of these proposals, you categorize objects by comparing them to a mentally represented "standard." The difference between the views lies in what that standard is. For prototype theory, the standard is the prototype—an average representing the entire cate- gory; for exemplar theory, the standard is provided by whatever example of the category comes to mind (and different examples may come to mind on different occasions). In either case, the process is then the same. You assess the similarity between a candidate object and the standard. If the resemblance is great, you judge the candidate as being within the relevant category; if the resemblance is minimal, you seek some alternative categorization. However, the mix of exemplar and prototype knowledge may vary from person to person and from concept to concept. One person might have extensive knowledge about individual horses, so she has many exemplars in memory; the same person might have only general information (a prototype, perhaps) about snowmobiles. Some other person might show the reverse pattern. And for all people, the pattern of knowledge might depend on the size of the category and how easily confused the category memories are with one another "Does this object resemble my sister's couch?" If so, the object is a couch. "Does the object resemble my prototype for a soup bowl?" If so, it's probably a soup bowl.

phrase structure rules

Rules that provide a set of instructions about how individual words can be clumped into higher-order categories and how these categories are combined to create well-formed sentences. -The rules of syntax take several forms, but they include rules that specify which elements must appear in a phrase and (for some languages) that govern the sequence of those elements. These phrase-structure rules also specify the overall organization of the sentence—and therefore determine how the various elements are linked to one another -phrase-structure rules help you understand the sentences you hear or read, because syntax in general specifies the relationships among the words in each sentence -Sometimes, though, two different phrase structures can lead to the same sequence of words, and if you encounter one of these sequences, you may not know which structure was intended. How will this affect you? We've just suggested that phrase structures guide interpretation, and so, with multiple phrase structures available, there should be more than one way to interpret the sentence.

garden paths

Sentence interpretation is very rapid, beginning before whole sentences are heard. Listeners jump to temporary false interpretations, called garden paths. - To recover, we consider, not only structure, but also plausible semantic relations among words. -Fat people eat accumulates. -Because he ran the second mile went quickly. -highlight the risk attached to the strategy of interpreting a sentence as it arrives: The information you need in order to understand these sentences arrives only late in the sequence, and so, to avoid an interpretive dead end, you'd be better off remaining neutral about the sentence's meaning until you've gathered enough information.

Combining phonemes

Sounds can be combined and recombined to produce thousands of different morphemes, which can themselves be combined to create word after word after word-no words in English contain the "tl" combination within a single syllable. (The combination can, however, occur at the boundary between syllables—as in "motley" or "sweetly.") These limits, however, are simply facts about English; they are not at all a limit on what human ears can hear or human tongues can produce, and other languages routinely use combinations that for English speakers seem unspeakable. There are also rules governing the adjustments that occur when certain phonemes are uttered one after another. -r the "s" ending that marks the English plural—as in "books," "cats," and "tapes." In these cases, the plural is pronounced as an [s]. In other contexts, though, the plural ending is pronounced differently. Say these words out loud: "bags," "duds," "pills." If you listen carefully, you'll realize that these words actually end with a [z] sound, not an [s] sound.

The tumor problem

Suppose you are a doctor faced with a patient who has a malignant tumor in his stomach. To operate on the patient is impossible, but unless the tumor is destroyed the patient will die. A kind of ray, at a sufficiently high intensity, can destroy the tumor. Unfortunately, at this intensity the healthy tissue that the rays pass through on the way to the tumor will also be destroyed. At lower intensities the rays are harmless to healthy tissue but will not affect the tumor. How can the rays be used to destroy the tumor without injuring the healthy tissue? The tumor problem, designed by Duncker (1945) and presented in Panel A, has been studied extensively. Can you solve it? One solution is to aim multiple low-intensity rays at the tumor, each from a different angle. The rays will meet at the site of the tumor and so, at just that location, will sum to full strength. People are much more likely to solve this problem if they're encouraged to use the hint provided by the problem shown in Panel B.

overregularization

The application of rules of grammar even when exceptions occur, making the language seem more "regular" than it actually is. -They say things like "Yesterday we goed" or "Yesterday I runned." The same thing happens with other morphemes, so that children of this age also overgeneralize their use of the plural ending— they say things like, "I have two foots" or "I lost three tooths" (Marcus et al., 1992). They also generalize the use of contractions; having heard "she isn't" and "you aren't," they say things like "I amn't."

syntax

The arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences in a language. -One might think that the rules of syntax depend on meaning, so that meaningful sequences are accepted as "sentences" while meaningless sequences are rejected as non-sentences. This suggestion, though, is wrong. As one concern, many non-sentences do seem meaningful, and no one's confused when Sesame Street's Cookie Monster insists "Me want cookie." Likewise, viewers understood the monster's wistful comment in the 1935 movie Bride of Frankenstein: "Alone, bad; friend, good."

Biology of language learning

The biological roots of language also show up in another manner—in the way that language is learned. This learning occurs remarkably rapidly, and so, by the age of 3 or 4, almost every child is able to converse at a reasonable level. Moreover, this learning can proceed in an astonishingly wide range of environments. Children who talk a lot with adults learn language, and so do children who talk very little with adults. In fact, children learn language even if their communication with adults is strictly limited. Evidence on this last point comes from children who are born deaf and have no opportunity to learn sign language - they invent their own gestural language (called "home sign") and teach the language to the people in their surroundings

concepts and the brain

The contrasts among different types of concepts are also reflected in neuro- science evidence. For example, fMRI scans show that different brain sites are activated when people are thinking about living things than when thinking about nonliving things (e.g., Chao, Weisberg, & Martin, 2002), and different sites are activated when people are thinking about manufactured objects such as tools rather than natural objects such as rocks -These results suggest that different types of concepts are represented in dif- ferent brain areas, and this point is confirmed by observations of people who have suffered brain damage -brain scans also show that sensory and motor areas in the brain are activated when people are thinking about certain concepts For example, when someone is thinking about the concept "kick," we can observe activation in brain areas that (in other circum- stances) control the movement of the legs; when someone is thinking about rainbows, we can detect activation in brain areas ordinarily involved in color vision

problem solving

The desire to figure out how to reach some goal Some are pragmatic ("I want to go to the store, but Tom borrowed my car, how can I get there?") Others are social ("I really want Amy to notice me; how should I arrange it?") Others are academic ("I'm trying to prove this theorem. How can I do it, starting from these axioms?")

Problem space

The initial state, goal state, and all the possible intermediate states for a particular problem.

Wolf Children

The outcome was similar for the 30 or so other wild children for whom researchers have evidence. When found, they were all shockingly animal-like. None could be rehabilitated to use language normally, although some (like Kamala) did learn to speak a few words. Of course, the data from these wild children are difficult to interpret, partly because we don't know why the children were abandoned in the first place

How do people perceive these various sounds?

The perceptual apparatus is "tuned" to provide just the information you need. After all, you want to know whether someone advised you to "take a path" or "take a bath." You certainly care whether a friend said, "You're the best" or "You're the pest." Plainly, the difference between [b] and [p] matters to you, and this difference is clearly marked in your perception. In contrast, you usually don't care how exactly the speaker pronounced "path" or "best"—that's not information that matters for getting the meaning of these utterances.

place of articulation

The position in the mouth where a consonant sound is produced -sounds can be categorized according to WHERE the airflow is restricted -you close your lips to produce "bilabial" sounds like [p] and [b]; you place your top teeth close to your bottom lip to produce "labiodental" sounds like [f] and [v]; and you place your tongue just behind your upper teeth to produce "alveolar" sounds like [t] and [d].

sentence parsing

The process of figuring out the syntactic role of each word in a sentence in order to understand it -It seems plausible that you'd wait until the sentence's end, and only then go to work on figuring out the structure. With this strategy, your comprehension might be slowed a little (because you're waiting for the sentence's end), but you'd avoid errors, because your interpretation could be guided by full information about the sentence's content. It turns out, though, that people don't use this wait-for-all-the-information strategy. Instead, they parse sentences as they hear them, trying to figure out the role of each word the moment it arrives (Can lead to errors)

speech segmentation

The process of perceiving individual words within the continuous flow of the speech signal. -Most of us are convinced that there are brief pauses between words in the speech that we hear, and it's these pauses, we assume, that mark the word boundaries. But this perception turns out to be an illusion, and we are "hearing" pauses that aren't actually there. This is evident when we "hear" the pauses in the "wrong places" and segment the speech stream in a way the speaker didn't intend -when we listen to speech we can't understand—for example, speech in a foreign language. In the latter circumstance, we lack the skill needed to segment the stream, so we're unable to "supply" the word boundaries. As a consequence, we hear what is really there: a continuous, uninterrupted flow of sound. That is why speech in a foreign language often sounds so fast

Whorfian hypothesis

The proposal that the language one speaks determines or heavily influences the thoughts one can think or the saliency of different categories of thought. -Some languages, for example, emphasize absolute directions (terms like the English words "east" or "west" that are defined independently of which way the speaker is facing at the moment). Other languages emphasize relative directions (words like "right" or "left" that do depend on which way the speaker is facing). Research suggests that these language differences can lead to corresponding differences in how people remember -Languages also differ in how they describe events. In English, we tend to use active-voice sentences that name the agent of the action, even if the action was accidental ("Sam made a mistake"). It sounds awkward or evasive to describe these events in other terms ("Mistakes were made") -The language you hear guides what you pay attention to, and what you pay attention to shapes your thinking. In this view, language does have an influence, but the influence is indirect: The influence works via the mechanisms of attention

morphemes

The smallest units of meaning in a language. Some morphemes, like "umpire" or "talk," are units that can stand alone, and they usually refer to particular objects, ideas, or actions. Other morphemes get "bound" onto these "free" morphemes and add information crucial for interpretation. Examples of bound morphemes in Figure 10.1 are the pasttense morpheme "ed" and the plural morpheme "s."

The extralinguistic context

The social and physical setting in which an utterance is encountered; usually, cues within this setting guide the interpretation of the utterance. -It turns out, however, that our catalogue of strategies isn't complete, because you also make use of another factor: the context in which you encounter sentences, including the conversational context. -"Put the apple on the towel into the box." Without the setting shown here, this sentence causes momentary confusion: The listener will initially think she's supposed to put the apple onto the towel and is then confused by the sentence's last three words. If, however, the sentence is spoken in a setting like the one shown in this picture, there's no confusion. Now, the listener immediately sees the ambiguity (which apple is being discussed?), counts on the speaker to provide clarification for this point, and so immediately understands "on the towel" as specification, not a destination.

connectionist network

They rely on distributed representations, in which each idea is rep- resented, not by a certain set of nodes, but instead by a pattern of activation across the network. To take a simple case, the concept "birthday" might be represented by a pattern in which nodes b, f, h, n, p, and r are firing, whereas the concept "computer" might be represented by a pattern in which nodes c, g, h, m, o, and s are firing. Note that node h is part of both of these pat- terns and probably part of the pattern for other concepts as well. Therefore, we can't attach any meaning or interpretation to this node by itself; we can only learn what's being represented by looking at many nodes simultaneously to find out what pattern of activation exists across the entire network.

Remote Associates Test

This involves finding a word that is related to three given words. example, you might be given the trio cross, rain, and tie; the correct answer is bow (as in crossbow, rainbow, and bowtie).

bookworm problem

When people translate a problem into concrete terms, whether visually or algebraically, which can sometimes lead to the wrong answer Solomon is proud of his 26-volume encyclopedia, placed neatly, with the volumes in alphabetical order, on his bookshelf. Solomon doesn't realize, though, that there's a bookworm sitting on the front cover of the A volume. The bookworm begins chewing his way through the pages on the shortest possible path toward the back cover of the Z volume. Each volume is 3 inches thick (including pages and covers), so that the entire set of volumes requires 78 inches of bookshelf. The bookworm chews through the pages and covers at a steady rate of 3⁄4 of an inch per month. How long will it take before the bookworm reaches the back cover of the Z volume?

propositions

a unit of meaning that is made up of concepts and expresses a single idea smallest units of knowledge that can be either true or false For example, "Children love candy" is a proposition, but "Children" is not; "Susan likes blue cars" is a proposition, but "blue cars" is not. Propositions are easily repre- sented as sentences, but this is just a convenience. They can also be represented in various nonlinguistic forms, including a structure of nodes and linkages, and that's exactly what Anderson's model does.

maxim of quantity

be only as informative as necessary to communicate the information -imagine that you ask someone, "What color are your eyes?" and he responds, "My left eye is blue." The extra detail here invites you to assume that the speaker specified "left eye" for a reason—and so you'll probably infer that the person's right eye is some other color. In these ways, listeners count on speakers to be cooperative and collaborative, and speakers proceed knowing that listeners make these assumptions. (

semantic bootstrapping

children rely on their knowledge of semantic relationships as a basis for figuring out syntax the very complexity of language is both a burden for the child (because there's so much to learn in "learning a language") and an aid (because the child can use each element as a source of information in trying to figure out the other elements).

sentences

coherent sequences of words that express the intended meaning of a speaker composed of phrases, which are composed of words.

stereotypes

concepts representing your ideas about groups of people have the same profile as any other concepts: It's difficult to find a rigid definition for most of these groups, because we can usually find individuals who are in the group even though they don't quite fit the definition. You also have a cluster of interwoven beliefs (a "theory") about these groups — beliefs that link your ideas about the group to many other ideas. You also have a prototype in mind for the group, but here we typically use a different term: You have a stereotype for the group.

orthography

correct spelling

How do you decide which features to ignore when assessing similarity and which features to consider? How do you decide, in comparing a plum and a lawn mower, which features are relevant and which ones aren't?

decisions about which features are important depend on your beliefs about the concept in question. Thus, in judging the resemblance between plums and lawn mowers, you were unimpressed that they share the feature "cost less than a thousand dollars." That's because you believe cost is irrelevant for these categories prototype use depends on judgments of resemblance (i.e., resemblance between a candidate object and a prototype). Judgments of resemblance, in turn, depend on your being able to focus on the features that are essential so that you're not misled by trivial features. And, finally, decisions about what's essential (cost or weight or whatever) vary from category to category and vary in particular according to your beliefs about that category

divergent thinking

expands the number of possible problem solutions (creative thinking that diverges in different directions) - an ability to move one's thoughts in a novel, unanticipated directions -success in divergent thinking is reflected in an ability to come up with a large number of new ideas — ideas that can then be evaluated to see if they're of any value.

Armstrong, Gleitman and Gleitman

gave participants this peculiar instruction: "We all know that some numbers are even-er than others. What I want you to do is to rate each of the numbers on this list for how good an example it is for the category 'even number.'" Participants were then given a list of numbers (4, 16, 32, and so on) and had to rate "how even" each num- ber was. The participants thought this was a strange task but followed the instruction nonetheless—and, interestingly, were quite consistent with one another in their judgments (see Table 9.2). Of course, participants responded differently (and correctly!) if asked in a direct way which numbers on the list were even and which were not. Appar- ently, then, participants could judge category membership as easily as they could judge typicality, but—importantly—these judgments were entirely independent of each other. Thus, for example, participants responded that 4 is a more typical even number than 7,534, but they knew this has nothing to do with the fact that both are unmistakably in the category "even number." -some basis for judging category membership that's separate from the assessment of typicality.

means-end analysis

heuristic in which the difference between the starting situation and the goal is determined and then steps are taken to reduce that difference ex. I want to take my son to nursery school. What's the difference between what I have and what I want? One of distance. What changes distance? My automobile. My automobile won't work. What is needed to make it work? A new battery. What has new batteries? An auto repair shop. I want the repair shop to put in a new battery; but the shop doesn't know I need one. What is the difficulty? One of communication. What allows communication? A telephone . . .

Concepts

ideas that represent a class or category of objects, events, or activities you need concepts in order to have knowledge, and you need knowledge in order to function. In this way, your understanding of ideas like "spoon" and "shoe" might seem commonplace, but it is an ingredi- ent without which cognition cannot proceed.

aphasia

impairment of language, usually caused by left hemisphere damage either to Broca's area (impairing speaking) or to Wernicke's area (impairing understanding).

Phonemes

in language, the smallest distinctive sound unit

parallel distributed processing

must all occur simultaneously — in parallel—with each other, so that one entire representation can smoothly trigger the next across a number of widely distributed, but connected, neural units in the brain. PDP models have an excellent capacity for detecting patterns in the input they receive, despite a range of variations in how the pattern is implemented. The models can there- fore recognize a variety of different sentences as all having the same structure, and a variety of game positions as all inviting the same next move. As a result, these models are impressively able to generalize what they have "learned" to new, never-seen-before variations on the pattern.

convergent thinking

narrowing the available problem solutions to determine the single best solution, and spotting ways in which seemingly distinct ideas might be interconnected - sometimes measured through remote associates test

graded membership

objects closer to the prototype are "better" members of the category than objects farther from the prototype

categorical perception

people are much better at hearing the differences between categories of sounds than they are at hearing the variations within a category of sounds. In other words, you're very sensitive to the differences between, say, a [g] sound and a [k], or the differences between a [d] and a [t]. But you're surprisingly insensitive to differences within each of these categories, so you have a hard time distinguishing, say, one [p] sound from another, somewhat different [p] sound.

syntax as a guide to parsing

people usually seek the simplest phrase structure that will accommodate the words heard so far. This strategy is fine if the sentence structure is indeed simple; the strategy produces problems, though, with more complex sentences People also tend to assume that they'll be hearing (or reading) active-voice sentences rather than passive-voice sentences, so they generally interpret a sentence's initial noun phrase as the "doer" of the action and not the recipient. As it happens, most of the sentences you encounter are active, not passive, so this assumption is usually correct. However, this assumption can slow you down when you do encounter a passive sentence parsing is also influenced by the function words that appear in a sentence and by the various morphemes that signal syntactic role (Bever, 1970). For example, people easily grasp the structure of "He gliply rivitched the flidget." That's because the "-ly" morpheme indicates that "glip" is an adverb; the "-ed" identifies "rivitch" as a verb; and "the" signals that "flidget" is a noun—all excellent cues to the sentence structure.

incubation

period of gestation-working on a problem but getting nowhere with it Limitations: Systematic studies, however, tell us that this pattern is (at best) unreliable. In these studies, participants are given a problem to solve. Some participants work on the problem continuously; some are interrupted for a while. The prediction, based on Wallas's proposal, is that we'll observe better performance in the latter group—the group that can benefit from incubation. The data, however, are mixed. Some studies do show that time away from a problem helps in finding the problem's solution, but many studies find no effect at all. Some researchers argue that incubation is disrupted if you're under pressure to solve the problem. Other authors focus on how you spend your time during the incubation period, with the suggestion that incubation takes place only if the circumstances allow your thoughts to "wander" during this period - spreading activation or relief from stressors

Knowledge refers to ___ rather than ___

potential, state If you know that Washington was a president, then the connections are in place so that if the "Washington" pattern of activations occurs, this will lead to the "president" pattern of activations. And this state of readiness will remain even if you happen not to be thinking about Washington right now. In this way, "knowing" something, in network terms, corresponds to how the activation will flow if there is activation on the scene. This is different from "thinking about" something, which corresponds to which nodes are active at a particu- lar moment, with no comment about where that activation will spread next.

speech perception

refers to how the brain processes speech and language -amplitudes, in the form of air-pressure changes, reach the ear, and so, in an important sense, the figure shows the pattern of input with which "real" speech perception begins. Notice that within this stream of speech there are no markers to indicate where one phoneme ends and the next begins. Likewise, there are, for the most part, no gaps to indicate the boundaries between successive syllables

descriptive rules

rules characterizing the language as it is ordinarily used by fluent speakers and listeners -strong regularities in the way English is used, and the rules we're discussing here describe these patterns. No value judgment is offered about whether these patterns constitute "proper" or "good" English. These patterns simply describe how English is structured—or perhaps we should say, what English is.

prescriptive rules

rules describing how language is "supposed to be" -Language that doesn't follow these rules, it's claimed, is "improper" or maybe even "bad." -We were taught never to say "ain't." Many of us were scolded for writing in the passive voice or starting a sentence with "And."

resemblance

similarity The reason is that the prototype and exemplar views both depend on judgments of resemblance (resemblance either to a prototype or to some remembered instance), and resemblance, in turn, is itself a complex notion. How do you decide whether two objects resemble each other? The obvious suggestion is that objects resemble each other if they share properties, and the more properties shared, the greater the resemblance. Therefore, we can say there's some resemblance between an apple and a tennis ball because they share a shape (round) and a size (about 3 or 4 inches in diameter). The resemblance is limited, though, because there are many properties that these objects don't share (color, "furry" surface, and so on). It turns out, though, that this idea of "resemblance from shared proper- ties" won't work. To see why, consider plums and lawn mowers; how much do these two things resemble each other? Common sense says they don't resemble each other at all, but we'll reach the opposite conclusion if we simply count "shared properties" (Murphy & Medin, 1985). After all, both weigh less than a ton, both are found on Earth, both have a detectable odor, both are used by people, both can be dropped, both cost less than a thousand dollars, both are bigger than a grain of sand, both are unlikely birthday presents for your infant -Resemblance does depend on shared properties, but—more precisely—it depends on whether the objects share important, essential properties.

fluent aphasia

speech is present but contains little meaningful communication -These patients can talk freely, but they say very little. One patient, for example, uttered, "I was over the other one, and then after they had been in the department, I was in this one"

maxim of relation

talk about what is relevant to the conversation For example, imagine that someone asks, "What happened to the roast beef?" and gets a reply, "The dog sure looks happy." Here, your assumption of relevance will most likely lead you to infer that the dog must have stolen the meat

prototype theory

the "best" or "most typical" member of a category. for example, the prototype dog will be the average color of the dogs you've seen, the average size of the dogs you've seen, and so forth. Problems: context effects and typicality -people who grow up in cities will think of pigeons vs in the countryside or the cold.

creativity

the ability to produce novel and valuable ideas remarkably flexible in approaches to problems -"Little-c creativity" (the everyday sort) -"Big-C Creativity" (the sort shown by people we count as scientific or artistic geniuses -Prerequisites: First have great knowledge and skills in their domain. Second need certain personality traits: a willingness to take risks, a willingness to ignore criticism, an ability to toler- ate ambiguous findings or situations, and an inclination not to "follow the crowd." Third, highly creative people tend to be motivated by the pleasure of their work rather than by the promise of external rewards. With this, highly creative people tend to work extremely hard on their endeavors and to pro- duce a lot of their product Fourth, these highly creative people have generally been "in the right place at the right time" — that is, in environments that allowed them freedom, provided them with the appropriate supports, and offered them problems "ripe" for solution with the resources available.

voicing

the act of the vocal cords either vibrating (voiced) or not vibrating (unvoiced) in the production of a consonant sound. You can feel this vibration by putting your palm on your throat while you produce a [z] sound. You'll feel no vibration, though, if you hiss like a snake, producing a sustained [s] sound. Try it! The [z] sound is voiced; the [s] is not.

embodied/grounded cognition

the body's sensory and action systems play an essential role in all our cognitive processes; it's inevitable, then, that our concepts will include representations of perceptual properties and motor sequences associated with each concept.

generativity of language

the capacity to create an endless series of new combinations, all built from the same set of fundamental units -someone who "knows English" (or someone who knows any language) hasn't just memorized the vocabulary of the language and some set of phrases. Instead, people who "know English" know how to create new forms within the language: They know how to combine morphemes to create new words, know how to "adjust" phonemes when they're put together into novel combinations, and so on. -most English speakers could not articulate the principles governing the sequence of morphemes within a word, or why they pronounce "wugs" with a [z] sound rather than an [s].

Problem-solving set

the collection of beliefs and assumptions a person makes about a problem

typicality

the degree to which an object or situations fits the average for its kind —plays a large role in people's thinking, with more-typical category members being "privileged" in many ways. Fourth, typicality is exactly what we would expect if category knowledge does, in fact, hinge on prototypes and exemplars. judgments of category membership depend on judgments of typicality, and so these two types of judgment will inevitably go hand in hand.

moment of illumination

the full meaning of the story becomes clear -- all parts fit together and the reader sees the unity of the whole. In other words, some participants abruptly announced that they were getting "hot" and, moments later, solved the problem. Other participants made the same announcement and, moments later, slammed into a dead end. It seems, therefore, that when you say "Aha!" it means only that you've discovered a new approach, one that you've not yet considered. there's nothing magical about the "moment of illumination." This moment doesn't signal that you've at last discovered a path leading to the solution. Instead, it means only that you've discovered something new to try, with no guarantee that this "something new" will be helpful.

semantic representation

the meaning of a word

Prosody

the patterns of rhythm and sound used in poetry -Prosody can, for example, reveal the mood of a speaker; it can also direct the listener's attention by specifying the focus or theme of a sentence -Consider the simple sentence "Sol sipped the soda." Now, imagine how you'd pronounce this sentence in response to each of these questions: "Was it Sue who sipped the soda?"; "Did Sol gulp the soda?"; or "Did Sol sip the soup?" You'd probably say the same words ("Sol sipped the soda") in response to each of these queries, but you'd adjust the prosody in order to highlight the information crucial for each question. -can also render unambiguous a sentence that would otherwise be entirely confusing (Beach, 1991). This is why printed versions of garden-path sentences, and ambiguous sentences in general, are more likely to puzzle you, because in print prosody provides no information. Imagine, therefore, that you heard the sentence "The horse raced past the barn fell." The speaker would probably pause momentarily between "horse" and "raced," and again between "barn" and "fell," making it likely that you'd understand the sentence with no problem.

coarticulation

the phenomenon in speech whereby attributes of successive speech units overlap in articulatory or acoustic patterns -in producing speech, you don't utter one phoneme at a time. Instead, the phonemes overlap, so that while you're producing the [s] sound in "soup," for example, your mouth is getting ready to say the vowel. While uttering the vowel, you're already starting to move your tongue, lips, and teeth into position for producing the [p]. This overlap helps to make speech production faster and considerably more fluent. But the overlap also has consequences for the sounds produced, so that the [s] you produce while getting ready for one upcoming vowel is actually different from the [s] you produce while getting ready for a different vowel.

pragmatics

the practical use of language that includes the ability to adjust language communication according to audience and context Your use of language also depends on your assumptions about how, in general, people communicate with each other For example, if someone asks, "Do you know the time?" you understand this as a request that you report the time—even though the question, understood literally, is a yes/no question about the extent of your temporal knowledge.

aids to speech perception

the speech you encounter, day by day, is surprisingly limited in its range. Each of us knows tens of thousands of words, but most of these words are rarely used. In fact, we've known for many years that the 50 most commonly used words in English make up roughly half of the words you actually hear -the perception of speech shares a crucial attribute with other types of perception: a reliance on knowledge and expectations that supplement the input and guide your interpretation. In other words, speech perception (like perception in other domains) weaves together "bottom-up" and "top-down" processes—processes that, on the one side, are driven by the input itself, and, on the other side, are driven by the broader pattern of what you know. In perceiving speech, therefore, you don't rely just on the stimuli you receive (that's the bottom-up part). Instead, you supplement this input with other knowledge, guided by the context

connection weights

the strength of the individual connections among nodes -learning requires the adjustment of many connection weights. We need to adjust the connec- tions, for example, so that the thousands of nodes representing "Washington" manage, together, to activate the thousands of nodes representing "president." In this way, learning, just like everything else in the connectionist scheme, is a distributed process involving thousands of changes across the network.

functional fixedness

the tendency to think of things only in terms of their usual functions; an impediment to problem solving

manner of production

the way in which a speaker momentarily obstructs the flow of air out of the lungs to produce a speech sound -We can distinguish sounds, first, according to HOW the airflow is restricted; -air is allowed to move through the nose for some speech sounds but not others. Similarly, for some speech sounds, the flow of air is fully stopped for a moment (e.g., [p], [b], and [t]). For other sounds, the air passage is restricted, but air continues to flow (e.g., [f], [z], and [r]).