Chapter 9-13 cognitive psychology
Basic Level
In Rosch's categorization scheme, the level below the global level (e.g. "table" or "chair") for the global category above which much information is lost and below which little is chained
Exemplars
In categorization, members of a category that a person has experienced in the past
Connection Weight
In connectionist models, a connection weight determines the degree to which signals sent from one unit either increase or decrease the activity of the next unit.
4 ways in which humans are predictably irrational
Psychic Budgets Sunk costs Inferior Third Choice Framing Effect
Instrument Inference
Inferences about tools or methods
Inferences
Inferences create connections that are essential for creating coherence in texts, and making these inferences can involve creativity by the reader. Thus, reading a text involves more than just understanding words or sentences. It is a dynamic process that involves transformation of the words, sentences, and sequences of sentences into a meaningful story.
Anaphoric Inference
Inferences that connect an object or person in one sentence to an object or person in another sentence
Casual Inference
Inferences that the events described in one clause or sentence were cause by events that occurred in a previous sentence
Sunk costs
Investment is irretrievably lost - focusing on the past and on the future and not the present -Movies: you hate the movie but you stick it out because you put money in -Relationship: Even if you are in a bad relationship, you stay in it because you cant forget all the time and emotion you put in
Conceptual Knowledge
Knowledge that enables people to recognize objects and events and to make inferences about their properties.
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation
Kosslyn and coworkers presented transcranial magnetic stimulation to the visual cortex while subjects were carrying out either a perception task or an imagery task. *The results showed that stimulation caused subjects to respond more slowly, and that Kosslyn concluded that the brain activation that occurs in response to imagery is not an epiphenomenon and that brain activity in the visual cortex plays a casual role in both perception and imagery
Imagery Neurons
Kreiman and coworkers found neurons that responded to some objects but not others. -For example, the records show the response of a neuron that responded to a picture of a baseball but did not respond to a picture of a face. The neuron fired in the same way when the person closed his or her eyes and imagined a baseball (good firing) or a face (no firing)
The language Instinct and The Stuff of Thought (Pinkard)
Language is an inate (and probably unique) feature of human behavior
Skinner
Language is learned through reinforcement -Chomsky debunked this and said that human language is encoded in the genes. -he completely disagreed with behaviorism
Rayner
Measured subjects' eye movements as they read sentences that contained either a high or low frequency target word. -Subjects look at infrequent words longer than frequent words.
Mental Model of Deductive Reasoning (Phillip Johnson-Laird)
Mental Model: is a specific situation represented in a person's mind that is used to help determine the validity of syllogisms -basic principle: A conclusion is valid only if it cannot be refuted by any model of the premises
Psychic Budgets
Mental categorization of money we've spent or are considering spending -The same amount of money feels different in different categories -wedding cake vs bday cake -education money vs vacation money
Using imagery to improve memory
Method of Loci: A method for remembering things in which the things to be remembered are placed at different locations in a mental image of a spatial layout. Pegword Technique: A method for remembering things in which the things to be remembered are associated with concrete words.
Are basic - level categories special
Naming things demonstration -The first name you come up with is basic-level categories 1. Global (Furniture) 2. Basic (Table) -Basic categories appear to be psychologically privileged -Basic gives just enough information: For each person your basic names will be influenced by experience and expertise 3. Specific (Kitchen Taste)
Piazza del Duomo demonstration
Neglect 1/2 of visual images
Mirror Neurons
Neurons in the premotor cortex, originally discovered in the monkey, that respond both when a monkey observes someone else (usually the experiment) carrying out an action and when the monkey itself carries out the action. There is also evidence for mirror neurons in humans.
Hierarchical Organization
Organization of categories in which larger, more general categories are divided into smaller, more specific categories. These categories can, in turn, be divided into even more specific categories to create a number of levels.
Evidence for Spatial Relationships
Overlap between Imagery & Perception -If the mechanisms for visual perception are also used for mental imagery, then predict: -Images should 'act-like' real-world pictures -Images with visual processing ..Right visual cortex may be particularly important for imagery
Making predictions based on knowledge about the environment
**We use language to interact with the environment Continually using our knowledge of the environment to make predictions about what we are about to read or hear. According to this idea, we take the "statistics" of the environment - our knowledge of what is most likely to occur - into account to determine meaning
Making predictions based on knowledge of language constructions
Readers also make predictions based on their knowledge of how their language is constructed -Our experience with certain sentence constructions can influence how we predict a sentence will be organized
Lexical decision task
Reading a list that consists of words and nonwords. Your task is to indicate as quickly as possible whether each entry in the two lists below is a word. -Lower response for less frequent words
Inductive reasoning
Reasoning based on observations, or reaching conclusions from evidence -conclusions are probably, but not definitely true -strong inductive arguments result in conclusions that are more likely to be true and weak inductive arguments result in conclusions that are less likely to be true *Factors that contribute to the strength on an inductive argument 1. Representativeness of observations 2. Number of Observations 3. Quality of the evidence *Anytime we make a predictions about what will happen based on our observations about what has happened in the past, we are using inductive reasoning. -using the past to guide present behavior
Pollack and Pickett
Recorded the conversations of subjects who sat in a room waiting for the experiment to begin. When the subjects were then presented with recordings of single words taken out of their own conversations. When the subjects were then presented with recordings of singles words taken out of their own conversations, they could only identify half the words, even though they were listening to their own voices. -Sounds of speech are easier to understand when we hear them spoken in a sentence -Knowing the meaning of a word helps us perceive them.
Morphemes
Refers to meaning (The smallest units of language that have a definable meaning or a grammatical function.)
Phonemes
Refers to sound
Word Superiority Effect (Reicher, 1969)
Refers to the finding that letters are easier to recognize when they are contained in a word than when they appear alone or are contained in a nonword. -Very brief presentation of word, single letter, or nonword, followed by mask -Task: From two choices, decide which letter was presented in the original stimulus *Result: Easier to identity a letter it is in the context of a word rather than presented by itself -B should be easier but A actually is
Depictive Representations
Representations that are like realistic pictures of an object, so that parts of the representation correspond to parts of the object
Can Images Be Studied Scientifically? -Bottom line Imagery impacts memory
-Introspectionists said, "Yes" -Behaviorists said, "No" -observable behavior -Alan Paivio (1971) said, "Let's try this again" -Duel-coding (or "conceptual peg") hypothesis -Concrete vs. abstract words in paired-associate learning -Two codes are better than one (1. Verbal and Imagery)
Mental Rotation
-Shepard & Metzler (1971) examined dynamic (not static) imagery -Mental chronometry: measure reaction time to make same/different judgments for shapes that are at different orientations (mental rotation task) -Strong linear relation between reaction time and degree of rotation -The more you have to mentally rotate an image the longer it takes you to make a decision about it
Naming
People are more likely to list some objects than others when asked to name objects in a category. -Experimental Result: -High-prototypical items are name first when people list examples of a category (Mervis)
Tacit Knowledge Explanation
People know that in the real world it takes longer to travel longer distances, so they simulate this results in Kosslyn's experiment. This is called tacit knowledge because it states that subjects unconsciously use knowledge about the world in making their judgements.
Typicality Effect
People react rapidly to members of a category that are "typical" of the category. -Experimental Result: -Faster reaction time to statements like "A_is a bird" for high-prototypical items (like robin) than for low prototypical items (like ostrich) (Smith)
Perception and Imagery
Perception and Imagery lines up perfectly in the first and second thirds of the brain. Not in the third part of the brain
Evidence for Spatial Relationships: Neuropsychological Case Studies
Perceptual problems are accompanied by problems with imagery -Damage to the parietal lobes can cause unilateral neglect -They ignore/neglect the left half of their visual field -Will only draw half of a flower or clock *It is not blindness
Shortcuts to inductive reasoning
1. Heuristics (more often): simple rules that usually (but not always) lead to a correct decision (Tversky & Kahneman) -Judgement of death experiment (Lichtenstein) 2. Algorithms: formulas that produce consistently optimal outcomes, but may be computationally intensive
Relationships Between Categories: Semantic Networks
1. Hierarchical Model (Collins and Quillian) -Nodes (concepts) are connected through links (relations) -Concepts organized hierarchically, show property inheritance -Cognitive Economy: Stored shared properties just once at a higher-level node
The structure of Language (Levels of Analysis)
1. Phonemes -Smallest unit of speech sounds 2. Words -Basic unit of the lexicon -semantic longterm -mental dictionary 3. Sentences -Ordering of words with syntactic structure 4. Texts -A group of related sentences **Ambiguities at each level
The topographic man
1. Research on the topographic map on the visual cortex indicates that looking at a small object causes activity in the back of the visual cortex, and looking at larger objects causes activity to spread toward the front of the visual cortex. 2. Subjects were then instructed to create small, medium, and large visual images while they were in a brain scanner. The result, is that when subject created small visual images, activity was centered near the back of the brain, but as the size of the mental image increased, activation moved toward the front of the visual cortex, just as it does for perception *Thus, both imagery and perception result in topographically organized brain activation
Is imagery Spatial or Propositional?
1. Spatial (Correct): Representation has the same structure as the thing represented -Retain properties of images 2. Propositional: Representations uses symbols or sentences; non-spatial -Propositions take the form or relation (argument)
The process of accessing the meaning of a word is influenced by many things
1. The frequency of a word determines how long it takes to process its meaning. 2. The context of the sentence determines which meaning we access, if a word has more than one meaning.
Is language Special?
1. The human brain is prepared to learn language 2. Languages are more similar than different across cultures 3. Critical period for language and syntax learning 4. People develop language and learn to follow complex grammatical rules easily 5. Cooing/babbling stages in babies is essential for learning phonemic structure of language
Input Units Hidden Units Output Units
1. Units in a connectionist network that are activated by stimulation from the enviornment 2. Units in a connectionist network that are located between input units and output units. 3. Units in a connectionist network that contain the final output of the network. *A stimulus presented to the input units is represented by the pattern of activity that is distributed across other units.
What is language?
1. Used for communication 2. Expresses our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences 3. Uses arbitrary symbols (sounds and shapes) 4. Possesses a hierarchical structure governed by rules - The rules are grammar and syntax 5. Is generative/creative (produce novel statements) -Chompsky: downfall of behaviorism -We have brains that are prepared for language 6. Is dynamic (evolves over time)
Evidence for Spatial Relationships: Brain Imagining Studies
1. fMRI study of visual areas activated by perceptions and visual images (Le Bihan) *Activity in the in the striate cortex increased both when a personed observed presentations of actual visual stimuli (perception) and when the person was imagining this stimulus (imagery) 2. fMRI studies of mental images of different sizes (kasslyn, 1993, 1995) -larger images activated more early visual areas in occipital lope - just like perception -The topographic map refers to the fact that specific locations on a visual stimulus cause activity at specific locations in the visual cortex and that points next to each other on the stimulus cause activity at locations next to each other on the cortex
How are objects placed into categories?
1.Definitonal Approach: Does an object have the defining features of the category -This approach has been proven to be wrong 2. Prototype Approach: Does an object resemble a "typical" memory of the category? - Evidence: Effects of Protypicality 1. Fruit example 2. Sentence verification technique (RT) shows typicality effect -higher reaction time for apple than a pomegranate 3. Priming - Color Rosch 3. Exemplar Approach: Does an object resemble one or more examples of the category
Cognitive Economy
A feature of some semantic network models in which properties of a category that are shared by many members of a category are store at a higher-level node in the network. For example, the property "can fly" would be stored at the node for "bird" rather than at the node for "canary"
Concepts
A mental representation of a class or individual. Also, the meaning ob objects, events, and abstract ideas. An example of a concept would be the way a person mentally represents "cat" or "house"
The Hub and Spoke Model
A model of semantic knowledge that proposes that areas of the brain that are associated with different functions are connected to the anterior temporal lobe, which integrates information from these areas.
Connectionism
A network model of mental operation that proposes that concepts are represented in networks that are modeled after neural networks. This approach to describing the mental representation of concepts is also called the parallel distributed processing approach (PDP)
Lexicon
A person's knowledge of what words mean, how they sound, and how they are used in relation to other words
Lexical Decision Task
A procedure in which a person is asked to decide as quickly as possible whether a particular stimulus is a word or non word.
Back Propagation
A process by which learning can occur in a connectionist network., in which an error signal is transmitted backward through the network. This backward transmitted error signal provides the information needed to adjust the weights in the network to achieve the correct output signal for a stimulus.
________ is a "typical" or "average" member of a category.
A prototype
Category-Specific Memory Impairment
A result of brain damage in which the patient has trouble recognizing objects in a specific category.
Prototype
A standard used in categorization that is formed by averaging that category members a person has encountered in the past.
Syllogism (Aristotle)
A syllogism consists of two premises followed by a third statement called the conclusion
Language
A system of communication using sounds or symbols that enables us to express our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences.
Sentence Verification Technique
A technique in which the participant is asked to indicated whether a particular sentence is true or false. For example, sentences like "An apple is a fruit" have been used in studies on categorization.
Spreading Activation
Activity that spreads out along any link in a semantic network that is connected to an activated node.
Inferior Third Choice
Add a choice that is clearly inferior to another choice to make another one of the choices look better -Online and paper subscription example
Semantic Category Approach
An approach to describing how semantic information is represented in the brain that proposes that there are specific neural circuits for some specific categories.
Semantic Network Approach
An approach to understanding how concepts are organized in the mind that proposes that concepts are arranged in networks.
Social Exchange Theory
An important aspect of human behavior is the ability for two people to cooperate in a way that is beneficial to both people.
Crowding
Animals tend to share many properties, such as eyes, legs, and the ability to move. This is relevant to the multiple-factor approach to the representation of concepts in the brain.
Hierarchical Model
As applied to knowledge representation, a model that consists of levels arranged so that more specific concepts, such as a canary or salmon, are at the bottom and more general concepts, such as bird, fish, or animal, are at higher levels
Syntax-first approach to parsing (Frazier)
As people read a sentence, their grouping of words into phrases is governed by a number of rules that are based on syntax. If, along the way, readers realize there is something wrong with their parsing, then they take other information into account in order to reinterpret the sentence.
Cheves Perky
Asked her subjects to "project" visual images of common objects onto a screen, and then to describe these images. Unbeknowst to the subject, Perky was back-projecting a very dim image of this object onto the screen. Therefore, The subjects descriptions of their images matched the images that Perky was projecting. *Not one of Perky's 24 subjects noticed that there was an actual picture on the screen. They had mistaken an actual picture for a mental image.
Alex Fine
Asked whether readers can learn to change their predictions based on experience with new constructions. Results: The results illustrate the role of experience in language processing by showing that the subjects adjusted their expectations about the RC sentences so that these structures eventually become easier to process. This experience-based explanation of sentence understanding supports the interactionist approach to parsing because it shows that a person's predictions about the structure of language can influence processing as the person is reading a sentence
Lexical Ambiguity
Assessing the meaning of a word is influenced by: 1. Frequency of the word in your mental lexicon 2. Context of the sentence 3. Meaning dominance (if more than 1 meaning)
Economic Utility Theory
Assumes people are rational, choose outcome with maximum expected utility -Utility = monetary value *Criticisms: Utility is subjective humans are predictability irrational *Utility: outcomes that achieve a person's goals **Deal or no deal example (Thierry Post)
Three types of Heuristics
Availability Heuristic Representativeness Heuristic Anchoring & Adjustment Heuristic
Priming
Presentation of one stimulus affects responses to a stimulus that follows. -Experimental Result: -Faster same-different color judgments for high prototypical items (Rosch) Conceptual/semantic priming due to spreading activation
Judgements
Primary mechanism in inductive reasoning: -How do people reason from evidence -Conclusions are probably, but not definitely true
Representativeness Heuristic:
Probability that event A comes from class b can be determined by how well A resembles the properties usually associated with class b -Leads people to ignore: -Base rate: relative proportion in the population -Conjunction rule: probability of a conjunction of two events (A and B) cannot be higher than the probability of the single constituents (A alone or B alone) -bank tellers and feminist bank tellers example on 375 (Tversky and Kahneman) **Law of Large Numbers -The larger the number of individuals that are randomly drawn from a population, the more representative the resulting group will be of the entire population
Wernicke's aphasia
Produce language that is fluent and grammatically correct but is incoherent. They also cannot understand speech and writing -Temporal lobe damage
Embodied Approach
Proposal that our knowledge of concepts is based on reactivation of sensory and motor processes that occur when we interact with an object.
Making inferences
Bransford and Johnson experience -they presented their subjects and asked what they remembered -- People use a similar creative process to make a number of different types of inferences are they are reading a text.
Which of the following statements is NOT cited in your text as a reason why categories are useful?
Categories provide definitions of groups of related objects.
Texts
Coherence: linking of information in one part of test to other parts -Enhanced by inference Inferences: determining what the text means by using our knowledge to go beyond the information provided by the text. -inferences are usually unconscious -Interaction of WM and LTM *Situation Model: mental representation of what a text is about (the nail and the eagle example: Stanfield and Zwaan) - reaction times were faster when the picture matched the situation described in the sentence - The situation model approach also includes the idea that a reader or listener simulates the motor characteristics of the objects in a story. According to this idea a story that involves movement will result in simulation of this movement as the person is comprehending the story.
Neuroeconomics
Combines research from the fields of psychology, neuroscience, and economics to study how brain activation is related to decisions that involve potential gains or losses -Ultimatum game 385 -Sanfey
Advantages of the Connectionist Approach
Concepts are represented by distributed network activity Connection weights can be excitatory or inhibitory Networks can be trained! Back propagation sends error signals backward through the network, which adjusts connection weights After many repetitions, network can "learn" and "generalize"! Networks show graceful degradation
Semantic Somatotpoy
Correspondence between words related to specific parts of the body and the location of brain activity associated with that part of the body.
Visual word paradigm (Tanenhaus) in regards to the interactionist approach to parsing
Determining how subjects process information as they are observing a visual scene. -subjects eye movements were measured as they saw objects on a table *results of the study - the way subjects interpret the sentence, as indicated by their eye movements, is determined by the scene they are observing. This result is different from the syntax first approach: If parsing is always based on the structure of a sentence, then changing the scene should have no effect on the eye movements.
Graceful Degradation
Disruption of performance due to damage to a system that occurs only gradually as parts of the system are damaged. This occurs in some cases of brain damage and also when parts of a connectionist network are damaged.
Availability Heuristic
Easily remembered events judged as more probable than less memorable events *Related to illusory correlation -Mistakenly assume things are correlated when they are not *Stereotype -An oversimplified generalization about a group or class of people that often focuses on the negative *Exaggerated due to confirmation bias -Selectively look for information that supports our beliefs and overlook information that argues against them *My side bias - Tendency for people to generate and evaulate evidence and test their hypotheses in a way that is biased toward their own opinions and attitudes; the myside bias is a type of confirmation bias
Incidental Emotions
Emotions that are not caused by having to make a decision (study be Jennifer Lerner- How emotions can affect the economic decisions of establishing selling and buying)
Expected Emotions
Emotions that people predict they will feel for a particular outcome -Risk aversion: the tendency to avoid taking risks. Can be influenced by emotions *One of the things that increases the chance of risk **The results of Kermers experiments showing that people greatly overestimate the expected negative effect of losing, compared to the actual effect of losing
Mental imagery involves
Experiencing a sensory impression in the absence of sensory input
Sensory-functional (S-F) hypothesis
Explanation oh how semantic information is represented in the brain that stated that the ability to differentiate living things are artifacts depends on one system that distinguishes sensory attributes and another system that distinguishes function.
Amir Amedi
Found that when subjects were using visual imagery, some areas associated with non-visual stimuli, such as hearing and touch, were deactivated or their action was decreased. This may be because visual images are more fragile than real perception and this deactivation helps quiet down irrelevant activity that might interfere with the mental image.
Finke and Pinker
Four dot display presentation experiment. They argue that because their subjects wouldn't have had time to memorize the distances between the arrow and the dot before making their judgements, it is unlikely that they used tacit knowledge about how long it should take to get from one point to another.
Paivio (1963) proposed the conceptual peg hypothesis. His work suggests which of the following would be most difficult to remember?
Freedom
Category
Groups of objects that belong together because they belong to the same class of objects, such as "houses," "furniture," or "schools"
Giorgio Ganis
His results show activation at three different locations in the brain. 1. Perception and imagery both activate the same areas in the frontal lobe 2. Perception and imagery both activate the same areas in the temporal and parietal lobes of the brain 3. Perception activates more of the brain in the occipital lobe than imagery
Belief bias
If a syllogism is true or agrees with a person's beliefs, it is more likely to be judged valid -Mistakenly think that truth = validity
The Wason Four-Card Problem
If there is a vowel on one side, then there is an even number on the other side -Performance is better on concrete versions of Wason problem *Permission schema -If a person satisfied a specific condition, the he or she gets to carry out an action
Which approach to categorization involves forming a standard representation based on an average of category members that a person has encountered in the past?
Prototype
Conclusions from the imagery debate
Imagery and perception have many features in common, but there are also differences between them.
How does visual imagery work?
Imagery happens in working memory -Visuospatial sketch pad -Image maintenance & inspection -Central Executive -Image transformation *Baddeley's working memory model
Hauk
Results show that areas of the cortex activated by the actual movements and by reading the action words. The activation is more extensive for actual movements, but the activation caused by reading the words occurs in approximately the same areas of the brain.
Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP)
See connectionism and connectionist network
Visual Imagery
Seeing in the absence of a stimulus -Picturing your childhood home
Multiple-factor Approach
Seeking to describe how concepts are represented in the brain by searching for multiple factors that determine how concepts are divided up within a category.
Where is knowledge in LTM in the hierarchy?
Semantic (meaning)
Patient M.G.S.
She had part of her right occipital lobe removed. Removing part of the visual cortex reduced the size of her field of view, so the horse filled up the field when she was farther away. This result supports the idea that the visual cortex is important for imagery
Martha Farah (Proposed a way out of the imagery debate)
She suggested that instead of solely relying on behavioral experiments, we should investigate how the brain responds to visual imagery. *Results of her experiment - accuracy was higher when the letter shown was the same as the one that had be imagined.
Alan Paivio
Showed that it was easier to remember concrete nouns, like truck or tree that can be imagined, than it is to remember abstract nouns, like truth or justice that are difficult to imagine. He used paired-associate learning *Proposed the conceptual peg hypothesis: concrete nouns create images that other words can hang onto
Decision-making
Situation with two or more courses of action, with the requirement to select just one
Broca's aphasia
Slow, labored, ungrammatical speech -Frontal lobe damage
Epiphenomenon.
Sometimes a behavioral event can occur at the same time as a cognitive process, even though the behavior isn't needed for the cognitive process. For example, many people look toward the ceiling when thinking about a complex problem, even though "thinking" would likely continue if they didn't look up.
The given new contract
States that a speaker should construct sentences so that they include two kinds of information. 1. Given information: Information that the listener already knows 2. New information: Information that the listener is hearing for the first time *Haviland and Clark demonstrate the consequences of not following the given new contract by presenting pairs of sentences and asking subjects to press a button when they thought they understood the second sentence in each pair -you need a sharing process
Evidence for Spatial Relationships: Mental Scanning
Task: Commit fictional map to memory (kosslyn et. al. 1978) *Scanning an image into your mind -measuring reaction time -more to scan-longer reaction time **Kosslyn determined the relationship between reaction time and distance shown. Just as in the boat experiment, it took longer to scan between greater distances on the image, a result that supports the idea that visual imagery is spatial in nature
Evidence for Spatial Relationships: Size in visual field
Task: Imagining Animals -Faster decision when image was larger (kosslyn 1978) Task: Image Walk Task -A task used in imagery experiments in which participants are asked to form a mental image of an object and to imagine that they are walking toward this mental image
Mental Imagery
The ability to recreate the sensory world in the absence of physical stimuli, also occurs in sense other than vision -Imagining tastes, smells, and tactile experiences
Exemplar Approach in Categorization
The approach to categorization in which members of a category are judged against exemplars - examples of members of the category that the person has encountered in the past
Units
The circles in the connectionist Approach
Lexical Ambiguity
The existence of multiple word meanings
Meaning Dominance
The fact that some meanings of words occur more frequently than others
Psycholinguistics
The field concerned with the psychological study of language. The goal of this field is to discover the psychological processes by which humans acquire and process language. -Four concerns: 1. Comprehension 2. Speech Production 3. Representation 4. Acquisition
Corpus
The frequency with which specific words are used and the frequency of different meanings and grammatical constructions in a particular language.
Definitional Approach to Categorization
The idea that we can decide whether something is a member of a category by determining whether the objet meets the definition of the category.
Prototype Approach to Categorization
The idea that we decide whether something is a member of a category by determining whether it is similar to a standard representation of the category - called a prototype.
Superordinate Level or Global Level
The most general category level distinguished by Rosch - for example, "furniture"
Subordinate Level or Specific Level
The most specific category level distinguished by Rosch- for example, "kitchen table"
Categorization
The process by which objects are placed in categories
Syntatic coordination
The process by which people use similar grammatical constructions -Bock Syntactic priming: copying of sentence form -Branigan - cards
Reasoning
The process of drawing conclusions
Decisions
The process of making choices between choices
Phonemes
The shortest segment of speech that, if changed, changes the meaning of a word. -Map roughly onto letters of the alphabet (~ 47 phonemes in English) -200 phonemes in all the worlds languages -Up until about 1 yr old babies can say all 200 phonemes until the environment starts to take over Ambiguities include: -Dialects or accents -Coarticulation: -Disambiguate sloppily produced phonemes using context -Phonemic Restoration Effect: Missing phonemes restored by context and never consciously identified as missing or Occurs when phonemes are percieved in speech when the sound of the phoneme is covered up by an extraneous noise. *Study Warren 1970s -You fill in what you miss which is a top-down processes -Warren also showed that the phonemic restoration effect can be influenced bu the meaning of the words that follow the missing phoneme. *McGurk Effect: Both visual and auditory information used in phoneme perception
Common ground
The speakers mutual knowledge, beliefs, and assumptions
Connectionist Network
The type of network proposed by the connectionist approach to the representation of concepts. Connectionist networks are based on neural networks but are not necessarily identical to them. One of the key properties of a connectionist network is that a specific category is represented by activity that is distributed over many units in the network. This contrasts with semantic networks, in which specific categories are represented at individual nodes. -Input units send signals to hidden units, which send signals to output units
Sue-Hynn Lee
They found that activity in the visual cortex in the occipital lobe resulted in the best prediction for what their subject were perceiving, and activity in higher visual areas was the best predictor of what their subjects were imagining
Family Resemblance
Things in a category resemble each other in a number of ways. -Experimental Result: -Higher ratings for high-prototypical items when people rate how "good" a member of the category it is (Rosch)
Deductive Reasoning: Conditional Syllogisms
Three statements, first one is "if-then" statement 1. If p, then q 2. P (or q) is/is not true 3. Conclusion about p (or q) "If" term (p) is antecedent "Then" term (q) is consequent
Falisication Principle
To test a rule, it is necessary to look for situation that falsify the rule -Need to test "p" and "not q" to have a valid deduction
Sentences
Two important properties: 1. Semantics: Meaning of words and sentences 2. Syntax: Rules for combining words into sentences *Dissociation of semantics and syntax evident in neuropsychological case studies and in event-related potential (ERP) studies of brain activity (erros of semantics and syntax generate ERP responses) -In the sentence the cats won't bake results in a larger N400 response -meaning of a word in a sentence -it is sensitive to the meaning of the word in a sentence -The the sentence the cats won't eating results in a larger N600 response -it is sensitive to the form of a sentence Ambiguities include: 1. Semantic Ambiguity: -Usually resolved by surrounding context 2. Syntactic Ambiguity: -Parsing: determines how words are grouped together into phrases as sentences are read (WM) -can be tricked by garden path sentences -garden path sentences are: Begin appearing to mean one thing but then end up meaning something else *these sentences illustrate temporary ambiguity: because the initial words of the sentence are ambiguous - they can lead to more than 1 meaning - but the meaning is made clear by the end of the sentence *Interactionist Approach to Parsing: Syntax + Semantics: -The idea that information provided by both syntax and semantics is taken into account simultaneously as we read or listen to a sentence
Anchoring & Adjustment Heuristic
Use initial estimate and adjust upward or downward based on other information -Real world applications: -Used car sales -Real estate appraisals -Credit cards
Evolutionary Perspective on Cognitive (Leda Cosmides and John Tooby)
We can trace many perspectives of our minds to the evolutionary principles of natural selection.
Deductive reasoning: Categorical syllogisms
We determine whether a conclusion logically follows from statements called premises -Two statements (premises), followed by a third statement (conclusion) -(Validity) Does the conclusion logically follow from the premises -A syllogism is valid when the form of the syllogism indicated that its conclusion follows logically from two premises.
Words
We experience speech segmentation even though language is produced in a speech stream -we put in pauses -Use top-down processing (context) to "fill in the gaps"
Word frequency effect
We respond more rapidly to high-frequency words than to low-frequency words.
Late closure
When a person encounters a new word, the new word is added to the current phrase for as long as possible. -It often leads to correct parsing
Balanced Dominance
When a word has more than one meaning but the meanings have about the same dominance
Biased Dominance
When words have two or more meanings with different with different dominances
Smith and Medlin 1981
Without concepts and categories, mental life would be chaotic.
Imageless thought debate
Wundt proposed that images were one of three basic elements of consciousness, along with sensations and feelings. This led to the Imageless thought debate: 1. (Francis Galton) Thought is possible without an image -Galton: people who had great dificulty formnig visual images were still quite capable of thinking 2. (Aristotle) Thought is impossible without an image *The behaviorists branded the study of imagery as unproductive because visual images are invisible to everyone except the person experiencing them.
Make sense of mixed results (look in notes for double dissociation)
You need attention to maintain a mental image -Visual perception necessarily involves bottom-up processing; visual imagery is necessarily top-down *The neuropsychological cases present a paradox: One one hand, there are many case that show close parallels between perceptual deficits and deficits in imagery. On the other hand, there are a number of cases in which dissociations occur, so that perception is normal but imagery is poor, or perception is normal but imagery is poor -The cases in which imagery and perception are affected differently by brain damage provide evidence for a double dissociation between imagery and perception. One way to explain this (Behrmann) is that the mechanisms of perception and imagery overlap only partially, with the mechanism for perception being located at both lower and higher visual centers and the mechanism for imagery being located mainly in higher visual centers
Imagery Debate
Zenon Pylyshyn: proposed another explanation (rather than kosslyn's) a debate about whether imagery is baed on spatial mechanisms, such as those involved in perception, or on mechanisms related to language, called propositional mechanisms. -Just because we experience imagery as spatial, that doesn't mean that the underlying representation is spatial *The spatial experience of mental images, argues Pylyshyn, is an epiphenomenon: something that accompanies the real mechanism but is not actually part of the mechanism -Example: of an epiphenomenon is lights flashing as a mainframe computer carried out its calculations. The lights may indicate that something is going on inside the computer, but they don't necessarily tell is what is actually happening.
The prototype approach to categorization states that a standard representation of a category is based on
category members that have been encountered in the past.
One beneficial property of connectionist networks is graceful degradation, which refers to the property that
damage to the system does not completely disrupt its operation.
Framing Effect
decisions are influences by how many choices are stated -Opt in vs opt out procedures: e.g. lowest organ donation rates for opt-in countries vs compared to opt-out countries (status quo bias) -Risk aversion vs. risk-taking strategies: Take more risks when a problem is framed in terms of loss *Tversky and Kaheman - 200 saved and 400 die experiment on page 385
Not all of the members of everyday categories have the same features. Most fish have gills, fins, and scales. Sharks lack the feature of scales, yet they are still categorized as fish. This poses a problem for the approach to categorization.
definitional
The definitional approach to categorization
doesn't work well for most natural objects like birds, trees, and plants.
Shepard and Meltzer measured the time it took for participants to decide whether two objects were the same (two different views of the same object) or different (two different objects). These researchers inferred cognitive processes by using
mental chronometry.
The scanning task used by Kosslyn involves
mental images.
Kosslyn's island experiment used the ______ procedure.
mental scanning
Heuristics
rules of thumb that are likely to provide the correct answer to a problem but are not fool proof
The ______ model includes associations between concepts and the property of spreading activation.
semantic network
Items high on prototypicality have ______ family resemblances.
strong
The conjunction rule states that
the probability of two events co-occurring is equal to or less than the probability of either event occurring alone.
One reason why basic level categories may be "psychologically privileged" is that
you lose a lot of details when jumping to a global category, but gain only a few details by jumping to a specific category.
