Cog Exam 3

Object concepts

- *Natural kinds (biological objects)* - *Artifacts (human-made objects)* - Lack any set of defining features - Relationship based on a family resemblance (share some but not all features) and fuzzy boundary (not necessarily absolutes of what a category is constituted of) structure - Decide which of these objects would you decide to be cups as opposed to mugs, bowls, glasses - When thinking about food- identified objects more as bowls than cups, when thinking about drinking- identified objects more as cups, think about coffee- more likely to say mugs - *Whatever is important in the current environment can influence how you categorize something*

Regressive Saccades

- 10-15% of saccades are backwards - Occur when a word is difficult - Good and poor readers differ in the quality of regressive saccades: - Good readers are good at regressing back to exactly where they encountered the problem - Poor readers must do more backtracking to zero on where they had a problem - But, regressive saccades are not the cause of poor reading - Way to differentiate good vs poor readers but not the cause- saccades that are off are not the cause of poor readers

Word Skipping

- 30% of words are skipped (Rayner, 1998) - Top-down and bottom-up factors affect the probability of word skipping - Words that tend to be skipped are: - Highly constrained, high frequency (top-down) - Short in length (bottom-up) - E.g. Since the wedding was today, the baker rushed the wedding ____ to the reception. Expect cake- don't need to read it because you expect that word is there, can skip this word

Language

- A collection of symbols and rules for combining these symbols, which can be used to create an infinite variety of messages - Words and grammar that allow for communication and comprehension - Characteristics: symbolic, generative, structured - Generative: can create new utterances all the time - Structured: there are rules in place

Subgoals:

- A goal that solves part of the problem - Can be an efficient means of reaching a solution - Sometimes might need to go back in time - Often times work for us but not always - Heuristic

Algorithm

- A procedure of steps that will solve a problem if followed correctly - Example: rules for multiplication

Saccades

- A quick movement of your eye - Discrete movements of the eyes - Saccadic suppression- during saccades we take in little to no visual information

Transformational Grammar

- A set of rule for transforming a sentence into a closely related sentence - "They are flying planes." - Close in meaning but the way you interpret depends on the grammatical structure - "Flying planes can be dangerous." - Different meanings from differential processing/parceling of a sentence - Parsing it out differently can lead to something having a different meaning - Levels of analysis: - Surface structure- what is heard, what is the uttrerance - Deep structure: what is meant, what did I mean by it - First data driven- process and translate sounds and meanings - To express a meaningful idea, words in the lexicon must be appropriately combined with grammatical rules. - Word meaning may help with understanding grammar by serving as a clue to processing grammar

Schema

- A specific type of concept that organizes related concepts and integrates past events - Mental concepts that contains multiple kinds of objects - Frames: physical features of environments, e.g. an office should have tables, chairs, desks, lamps, pens, etc. - Scripts: routine activities, often social, rules, e.g. visiting a restaurant: talking to the host, being shown to a table, ordering from the waiter, eating, paying, leaving, you generally know what to do and what interaction will entail - Help us interact in the social environment very effectively

Heuristics

- A strategy that is often helpful in solving a problem - Can fail - Examples: working backwards, means-end analysis, subgoals, etc.

Expertise and reasoning

- A task that has abstract or unfamiliar content can be very difficult, compared with the same task with familiar content - Four-card selection problem - If each card has a letter on one side and a number on the other, which cards would you have to turn over to determine the truth of the sentence: "Every card that has a D on one side has a 3 on the other side." - Most people want to turn over the 3 because of confirmation bias - Only 5 of 128 subjects correctly selected the D and 7 cards- most picked D and 3 (Watson & Shapiro, 1971) - People make mistakes because they seek information that would verify the rule rather than information that would falsify it - Would using more realistic materials related to everyday knowledge make the task easier? - "Every time I go to Manchester, I travel by car.": 10 out of 16 correct, 2 out of 16 with abstract original - "If a letter is sealed, then it has a 50-lira stamp on it.": 17 out of 24 correct; 0 out of 24 in original abstract problem - Why the improvement?: better reasoning or recall from memory, experience - Memory better than reasoning: U.S. should be worse at solving this problem because they have nothing to recall from memory because no experience with this - U.S. subjects did poorly on both tasks- no experience with British postal system - "If a person is drinking beer, then the person must be over 21 years of age.": 29 of 49 correct; none of 40 correct n the abstract original - In part, expertise is allowing you to rely on memory from having been in a similar situation allowing you to know what to do and how to solve the problem efficiently

Dyslexic characteristics

- Accurate but slow word recognition - Poor spelling - Central issue is lack of phonological awareness: difficulty mapping sounds of words to orthography, must rely on direct route to word recognition - Non-remitting (no "cure"): special accommodations required for standardized testing situations - Trouble spelling- related to sounding out those words

Spreading activation

- Activity that spreads out along any link that is connected to an activated node: concepts that receive activation are primed and more easily accessed from memory - Info that is primed is more readily available - Experimental evidence: lexical decision task (indicate as quickly as possible whether a word or not), vary the order of presentation - If activation spreads, then I should be quicker to verify something that is already activated rather than something that has not been activated at all - If activation spreads, bread should provide quicker RT with wheat than chair and money - RT will be quicker when primed with associated word as opposed to non-associated word - By previously presenting one with a related word, it improves RT

Greeno (1978): Three types of problems

- Arrangement: some objects are presented and the problem solver must rearrange them in a way that satisfies some criterion - Inducing structure: a problem that requires finding a pattern among a fixed set of relations - Transformation: a problem that requires changing the initial state through a sequence of operations until it matches the goal state

People have difficulty with syllogisms because there are many cognitive constraints on syllogistic reasoning

- Atmosphere hypothesis: All A are B, All C are B, Therefore, All A are C; all or some make it more difficult - Working memory limitations - Illicit conversion- misinterpretation of a premise - Belief bias- accepting a conclusion as valid if it is consistent with personal beliefs

Prototypes

- Best representative example of a category - Category membership is determined by comparing an object to the most typical member of a category - Prototype may not be an actual category member, but an average, abstracted representation of the category containing salient features that are true of most instances - Key: that each category has, at its core, a prototypical member - More likely, and more quickly to categorize if object is closer to resembling prototype - Can be abstracted through repeated presentations with category members: Posner, Goldsmith, Welton (1967)- presented dot patterns to participants: all were generated from the same prototype, prototype never shown - Shown shapes during recall, asked if previously seen- prototype frequently recognized as 'old' over other previously seen items - Prototype extracted from that patterns that you were exposed to, so you think you previously saw it - Prototypes: Bat, penguin, owl sparrow or telephone, mirror, China, Chair/sofa - There are better examples, more prototypical of that category than other category members

Factors affecting "landing spot"

- Bottom-up factors- based on physical characteristics - Length of saccade is determined by: length of the current word being fixated on - Length of the word to the immediate right - Fixations "land" about ¼ of the way into the word

Evidence for the distinction between syntax and semantics

- Broca's aphasia - In large part the problem results from damage to connectivity in certain areas in the brain - Early patient "Tan" (M. Leborgne) - Inability to produce fluent, grammatical speech - "Yes...ah...Monday er...Dad and Peter H...and Dad....er..hospital...Wednesday, none o'clock... Doctor... and er...teeth..." (patient at hospital for dental surgery) - Frontal cortical issue - Wernicke's aphasia - Difficulty comprehending other's language - Can speak but don't make any sense - Syntax problem not fluency problem - Speech is grammatical and fluent but doesn't convey meaning** - "Wee this is...mother is always her working her work out o'here to get her better, but when she's looking in the other part. One their small tile into her time here,. She's working another time because she's getting too..."

Remember the typicality effect?

- Closer to prototype, quicker one should be able to make a response - Which should be faster? A canary is a bird or an ostrich is a bird? Canary - Semantic network prediction: both should be stored as subordinates to the category bird - Research evidence: canary identified faster than an ostrich - Strength of connection between subordinate levels and baseline, more prototypical, more quickly you can move through the network

Reasoning

- Cognitive processes by which people start with info and come to conclusions that go beyond that info - In other words- in reasoning we move from what is already known to infer a new conclusion - Decisions: outcomes of the reasoning process - Conclusions can come from principles or evidence: - Deductive reasoning (general to specific) - Inductive reasoning (specific to general)

Meaning (Semantics)

- Colorless green ideas sleep furiously! (Chomsky) - Following grammatical rules does not always result in meaning - Meaning can be derived from grammatically incorrect statements

Perea, Acha, and Carreiras (2009): constructed sentences that contained either orthographic abbreviations or phonetic respellings- measured sentence reading time

- Concluded that it may be quicker to type in text speak but it is not quicker to read in text speech - Time for text-message style sentences was slower than normal text - Time saved in texting comes with a severe reading cost

Phonemic restoration effect

- Context matters in processing language - It was found that the *eel was on the axle - It was found that the *eel was on the shoe - It was found that the *eel was on the orange - It was found that the *eel was on the table - Participants were easily able to fill in the missing sound based on context - Cough inserted at the * - We fill in missing sounds based on context so the sentence makes sense

Feature comparison model

- Defining feature: necessary to be a member of a category - Characteristic feature: usually present but not necessary - Canary has both, lots of overlap so can make decision at stage 1, ostrich has defining features so categorization takes longer - Two-stage process: first, compare all features- very similar or dissimilar, easily decide true or false, and second, search for defining features - Ostrich- characteristics of being a bird, but not defining features of being a bird - Explains why typicality effects would show up where one might think they shouldn't

Rule-governed concepts

- Definitional approach- category membership is determined based on whether the object possess the defining features of a category (every feature must be present) - E.g. Dog: has four legs, has a tail, has fur, barks - Issue: what are the features that need to be present to allow object to be a category member - Problem: Is a dog without a tail still a dog? Still a category member, just missing a feature - Difficult to determine what features are necessary for an object to be a category member

Theories of word recognition

- Direct-access: orthography (word's written letter pattern) allows for direct access to the semantic memory representation, written to meaning - Indirect-access: access to word's semantic memory goes through its phonological representation first, written to phonological representation - Indirect more accurate representation of what we do when we're reading - Hear table, see table- symbolic, then access meaning - Slightly less efficient way of getting information, 3 instead of 2

Deductive reasoning

- Logical reasoning: Process of reasoning from one or more general statements regarding what is known to reach logically certain conclusions - Based on logical propositions: propositions- assertions that can be either true or false - Syllogistic reasoning: two statements (premises) - Conclusion

Coherence Comprehension of discourse depends on more than the content of individual sentences

- Discourse needs to have some type of structure, and links between ideas - Local structure: connections (either explicit or implicit) between individual sentences - Global structure: general knowledge brought to what is being read - Difficult to comprehend due to lack of local structure (first example) - Difficult to comprehending due to lack of global structure (second example)

Words as grammatical clues

- Distinction between animate and inanimate nouns - The defendant examined by the lawyer turned out to be unreliable - Eyes slowed down at underlined area, but not it the second sentence, slow down slightly because word meaning has lead me astray to find the meaning - The evidence examined by the lawyer turned out to be unreliable

Phonemes- the sounds of language

- Evidence for extraction of prototypic speech sounds for a language - Causes differences in pronunciation to sound more alike - Should this make us better or worse at understanding language - Learning a different language- difficulty using their phonemes - Extraction allows for people that use slightly different pronunciations- we can still understand them because we are still getting the underlying sounds - Better by extracting unique phonemes - Learn to extract the sounds from their speech

Other problems in reasoning

- Falsification principle: to test a rule, it is necessary to find situations that would falsify it - Confirmation bias: people's tendency to seek information that confirms their beliefs- why people typically turn over "4" on the card task - You should be actively trying to find evidence that is inconsistent - Belief bias: what people know/believe to be true interferes with their ability to assess validity

Family resemblance

- Family members share some but not all characteristics- true of any category and its members - Members of the Smith family look similar- but no two Smith brothers share all the family features - Prototype= #9: brown hair, large ears, large nose, mustache, glasses - Prototype- most representative category member - Some category members are better overall representations than others

Enhancing Creativity: Visual imagery

- Finke, 1990: subjects were given a set or basic parts (think geons), instructed to close their eyes and imagine combining them to make a practical object or device, judgements based on practicality and originality - Conditions: subjects selected parts but were assigned a category, subjects given parts but could choose category, subjects told what parts and what category - Which would result in the most creative output? Once you're given something you start thinking of how they can be combined so somewhat constrained in making your choice, those with 0 choice will probably be the most creative because they are not constrained - Being creative only helps when you're making something of use? - Subjects given parts but didn't find out the category until after the had assembled their objects (preinventive forms) - Most successful condition of all for generating creative inventions - Most creative- given parts and put them together and then given a category- led to the most creativity- preinventive forms

The way a decision is presented can influence choices: Slovic et al. (2000)

- Forensic psychiatrists and psychologists read a case history of a mental patient and were asked to judge the likelihood that he would commit an act of violence within the next 6 months if discharged - Framed in two ways: 20 out of every 100 patients similar to Mr. X are estimated to commit an act of violence OR patients similar to Mr. X are estimated to have a 20% chance of committing an act of violence - Results: 41% vs. 21% refused to discharge

Morphemes- smallest unit of a language that carries meaning

- Free morphemes- stands alone (words), PREPARE - Bound morphemes- must accompany a free morpheme to have meaning, UN, ED - UNPREPARED: UN (negates) PREPARE (free morpheme) ED (past tense) - Can store free and bound morphemes to put them together and make a lot more words - Top-down factors- knowledge of language helps find word boundaries - Here our knowledge on previous language doesn't help us, we need to parse the words out- 3rd- lots of words pop up when you try to engage in parsing

Does semantic processing affect syntactic analysis?

- Garden-path sentence difficulty could be due to difficulties in processing semantics, rather than syntax - Is the garden-path effect due in part to meaning?

Syntax

- Grammar, rules for forming phrases and sentences

Conditional reasoning

- If p, then q - Look at table - Affirming the antecedent: p therefore q: valid - Denying the consequent: not q, therefore not p valid - Affirming the consequent and denying the antecedent: not valid - People are good at situation where antecedent is affirmed built in all other situations, people's ability to determine validity is poor

Pickering and Traxler (1998)

- If semantics influence syntactic analysis: Garden-path difficulty should be more pronounces when the initial interpretation is semantically plausible... compared to implausible - Conditions: read garden-path sentences that were plausible or implausible - Just syntax that matters: should get same types of effects across both sentences because they both violate S-V-O - Found stronger garden-path effects for plausible sentences: semantic plausibility of the sentence induced more of a "commitment" from readers - Indicates that syntax does not necessarily dominate semantics in sentence processing: as in the processing ambiguous words, multiple interpretations are considered, with one biased by context - Results consistent with the interactionist view

Data support the indirect access view

- Individuals are making more errors, classifying the pseudohomophones - Pseudohomophones interfered with relatedness judgments - Creating a categorization problem- relatedness- by activating a sound of something that is related - Activated phonological representation in spite of non-word status

Parafoveal information

- Information that falls slightly out of fixation, but still within perceptual span: - Word length - Word boundaries - Blank spaces help to constrain set of upcoming possible word candidates

Dyslexia

- Involves problems in printed word recognition - Normal performance on measures of intelligence and comprehension

Some language training projects involve nonhuman animals learning how to follow commands

- Learning to follow a command requires an understanding of word order - Example: difference between bring the ball to the trainer vs. bring the trainer to the ball

We use it all the time in everyday life

- Make predictions about what will happen based on observations about what has happened in the past - Mechanism for using past experience to guide present behavior - Often done by way of shortcuts- heuristics - Friend will get mad if you don't call them back so it will influence you to call them back - Top-down processing: prior experience to more effectively interact with the environment

Availability heuristic

- Making judgements about the frequency or likelihood of an even based on how easily instances come to mind - distinctive or emotionally salient events overestimated - Black swan - Difficult to bring instances to mind, likely to underestimate its frequency and easiness to bring instances to mind, likely to overestimate its frequency - Plane crashed- more fear inducing, hear about them more than car accidents - Things other than frequency influence availability: emotion, differential exposure to information - We overestimate our contributions to group events and underestimate others' contributions

Can animals learn to use language?

- Many different species have been used in language training programs - You can teach animals to label but labeling in itself doesn't contain all of the language design features - All language training projects involve teaching labels for salient objects in the environment: non-human animals are able to learn these labels

Semantics

- Meanings expressed through language

What are concepts?

- Mental representations of an item and associated knowledge and beliefs - Give us useful knowledge that we use to understand things - Categorization: the process by which concepts are placed into groups, *useful because they help us understand individual cases we have not previously encountered, a way we interact with the world* - Can make distinctions about whether a category member shares features with other category members

Meta-representations

- Mental representations of other mental representations - It is not enough to have representations of all relevant objects in the world - You also need to keep track of other people's representations about relevant objects - My understanding of your mental representations and my understanding of my mental representations

According to GP approach, two heuristics used for parsing

- Minimal attachment (MA): we assume the syntax to be as simple as possible, readers are parsimonious in beginning new phrases - Late closure (LC): readers attempt to include a new word in the grammatical structure currently being processed

Morphemes and Mondegreens and "Slips of the tongue"

- Misheard word boundaries - Examples in spoken language and music - Experience with a particular speaker or artist helps to fine-tune ability to process speech sounds - Knowledge of speaker or musician's topic can help disambiguate - Song lyrics- often misinterpret- look them up- helps next time you hear it - Cue into general topic can help with parsing things, creating boundaries in a place that makes sense - Background knowledge of topic or song - Exchange error- two linguistic units are substituted for each other during sentence production - Word: "Writing a mother to my letter." - Morpheme: "Slicely thinned." - Phoneme: "lork yibrary" - Can exchange a word for word, morpheme for morpheme, phoneme for phomene - Error when you are exchanging one unit for another unit, same or different - Somehow words are stored separately than are morphemes and phonemes

Procrastination and Creativity

- Moderate procrastinators more creative than chronic procrastinators or procrastinators - Procrastination gives you time to make unexpected links and form new lines of ideas - By delaying the task, one can leave themselves open to the widest range of ideas - It can be a virtue for creativity - When you feel doubt, don't let it go

Expected value was a normative model

- Modifications to make it more descriptive - Utility- subjective value as determined by the decision maker - Our decisions are affected by emotions - Many decisions carry a certain amount of risk, which is associated with emotions - We tend to overestimate the expected negative effect if losing, compared to the actual effect of losing - We also assign a greater impact (expected) to a loss than to a gain - Overestimate response we will feel to negative outcomes and so we are more conservative

Transformation problems:

- Modifying an initial state through a sequence of operations until the goal state is achieved - Initial state: everyone on one side of the river - Goal state: everyone on the other side of the river - Rules and operations to follow - Think about how the additional variable are influencing the problem - Trial and error - Solutions require planning based on means-end analysis: identifying what differences exist between the current state and the goal; state and selecting operations that will reduce these differences - Sometimes have to move away from the goal state to get to where you need to be

The 4-card task "If a card has a vowel on one side, then it has an even number on the other side." Which cards do you need to turn over to determine if this statement is true?

- Need to turn over the ___ and ___ - Making an abstract problem concrete and related to experience made it easier to solve - "If a person is drinking beer, then the person must be over 21 years of age." - Have to turn over drinking beer and 16 years old to see if this card is violating this rule - 29 out of 49 correct; none of 40 correct in abstract original, do not need to turn over drinking coke or 21 years ole - make it concrete/related to yourself- it will be easier to solve

Are mental images the same as perceptions?

- Neuroimaging studies: demonstrate that subjects seem to use the same brain areas when retrieving a mental image as when visually perceiving an image - There are some important limitations: details of objects don't seem to be as readily available in mental images as in perceptions - Is there a rectangle? No. Is there a parallelogram? When imagining it in mind, they wouldn't be able to answer correctly, we are less able to evaluate all of the images when it is mental

Word jumbling does come with a cost

- Normal text condition associated with best proficiency - Not all word jumblings are equal - Internal letter transpositions were the least costly - Initial letter transpositions were the most costly

Inferences: Conclusions drawn by the reader

- Not explicitly stated in discourse - "Greg left the game disgusted by his team's inability to score." Inference: the team lost - inferences involve the combination of world knowledge with text information: inferences become part of the text's mental representation

Arrangement problems

- Objects must be arranged to satisfy a specific criterion - Typically solves using trial and error - Partial solutions are formed and evaluated - Example: Anagrams- form a word from a string of letters - Trial and error - Fit all of your stuff into your car when you're moving

Experts spend more time analyzing problems:

- Often have a slow start on a problem because they spend time trying to understand the problem rather than immediately trying to solve it - However, experts are better problem-solvers in their field only AND they are less open to new ways of looking at problems: being an expert might be a disadvantage when a problem requires flexible thinking

Are all communication systems language? Animal communication systems don't possess all the design features- only semanticity

- Often not verbal- using various objects to communicate - They communicate but don't use language

Kintsch (1974)- tested the role of inferences in text representations

- Participants presented with sentences that: - Implies a fact (e.g., a cigarette started a fire)- a burning cigarette was carelessly discarded, the fire destroyed many acres of virgin forest - Explicitly stated the fact (control condition)- a carelessly discarded burning cigarette started a fire, the fire destroyed many acres of virgin forest - Evidence suggests inferences become part of your mental representation of the text - After a short delay, explicit statements more quickly verified than implied statements - After long delay, no difference in verification time - Implication: Inferred "facts" became part of the text representation

Rayner, White, Johnson, and Liversedge (2006)

- Participants read 80 sentences in one of four conditions - Control condition: sentences left intact - Internal letters of words transposed - Beginning letters transposed - Ending letters transposed - Looking at amount of time spent fixating on the word and words read per minute: DV - Spelling does make a difference

The influence of emptions- Kermer et al. (2006):

- Participants received $5; coin flip would determine whether they would win an additional $5 or lose $3 - People overestimated how bad or good they would feel, there is a significant difference in their anticipated emotion more so for negative than for positive - Rated their happiness before the experiment started and asked to predict how it would change if they won ($5 + $5 = $10) or lost ($5 - $3 = $2) - Also rated happiness after the coin flip - Conclusions: - There is a difference between predicted emotions and the actual emotions experiences after making a decision - People overestimate the expected negative emotions associated with loss - This inability to correctly predict the emotional outcome of a decision, which can lead to inefficient decision-making Mistakes from comparing to the past (most) and comparing to the possible (less)

Fixation

- Pauses between saccades (200 to 300 ms) - Gazes- consecutive fixations

Expertise and analogical reasoning

- People often fail to spontaneously notice a useful analogy (remember the radiation and military problems?) - Expertise in particular subject matter increases ability to perceive how problems are related, even when they have different content - Silver, 1981: How are these problems related- two of them related with surface content (what the problem is about, and two of them are related with deep content - Novice should focus on surface relations - Strategy you need to employ to solve problems one and two- underlying deep structure- is more similar then the surface level of one and three - All subjects were asked to categorize 'mathematically related' problems (Silver, 1981) - Good problem solvers grouped based on structure - Poor problem solvers based on content - Similar results for Chi et al. (1982) with physics problems - Novices categorized by objects, like spring problems or inclined-plane problems (surface features) - Experts categorized on basis of physics principles needed to solve them (deep structure)

Evidence for semantic networks

- Prediction: time to retrieve info about a concept should correspond to a distance that must be traveled through the network (i.e., number of inks): it should take longer to decide whether a canary is an animal than whether a canary is a bird because to get from canary to bird it only takes one step and to get from canary to animal, it takes 2 steps - Should be faster to identify specific unique feature of more specific category: bird - Reaction time: move up network- expect an increase in reaction time - Next verifying feature rather than category

Typicality effects:

- Prototypes are processed preferentially - How quickly can you say if something is part of a category - More prototypical- categorized much more quickly - Indicate if object is part of a category - RT faster for more typical - Prototypes are processed preferentially - Named more rapidly: participants list prototypical members of categories before less typical ones, e.g. birds- sparrow before penguin - Give us an advantage/ more affected by priming: hear 'green', are the two objects presented on the screen the same or different based on their color, some greens are more prototypical than others, quicker in responding when there were more prototypical versions of that particular category

How do we determine the strength of an argument?

- Representativeness of observations: How well do observations about a particular category represent all members of this category, to what extent is this a good observation - Number of observations: the more observations, the stronger the argument - Quality of evidence: stronger evidence, supported with objective measurement, leads to stronger arguments, subjective judgements- he's annoying- make it difficult to find evidence to support if it is true

Gestalt psychology

- Representing the problem in mind - Restructuring the problem- changing its representation - Restructuring leads to *insight*- sudden realization of a problem's solution - Rearrange elements (internally and mentally) to solve the problem - Insight- sudden discovery of a solution, should people be able to report how near they are to a solution? - Experimental evidence: subjects were given insight problems (like the triangle) or non-insight problems (algebra) - Should see slow steady increase in estimates of solving a problem in a non-insight solution and for insight- should go from far away to got it - Non-insight problems require steady progress toward a solution - All subjects were asked to indicate how close they were to the solution (1=cold; 7=hot) whenever a tone sounded - Insight problems: ratings of warmth were low until just before solution found - Non-insight problems: ratings gradually warmer as closer to goal

Evidence for mental images

- Rotation time increases as degree of rotation increases - Almost a perfect linear relationship- actually rotating mental image in my mind to get to the point where I can visualize the image - How much did I need to rotate the object as a result of my reaction time? - The more I need to rotate it, the longer it will take for me to make the decision - Another study: - Mental maps: subjects study map, once learned, asked to imagine moving from one object to another while not looking at the map, subject press a button when they have "arrived" - If actually traversing the mental image in my mind, it should take longer - Participants showing near linear relationship between reaction time and amount of distance one would have to travel on the map - Suggests that spatial relationship between object and the maps is preserved in the mental image - Another: simple image, ask to go from back of boat to porthole or anchor, time it will take to get there will differ depending on how "far" it is

Morphology

- Rules for forming complex words, including regulars

Phonology

- Rules that define the sound pattern of a language

Another problem- basics of availability in relation to sample/population size

- Sample size is important - People usually pick option C that it will be about the same - The smaller hospital should record more days because smaller sample sizes usually have more variation - Law of small numbers- we mistakenly expect small samples to mirror population statistics - Gambler's fallacy: when people are gambling they'll often think that next time they'll get a good hand and then next time they'll get a good hand, across a few rolls of a die, you won't get good representative numbers, people think their luck has to change because they think their small sample size is representative

Evidence for semantic storage

- Semantic network models: help us store and organize info in LTM by linking concepts to related concepts, hierarchical structure (cognitive economy) to relate stores in mind - Research- thought: go in at basic level rather than superordinate or subordinate, now experts are more likely to access - Idea: we have this hierarchical storage structure to facilitate quicker retrieval And avoid redundancy - Feature comparison model: items are categorized by matching the item's feature to the category features. Is a robin a bird? Depending on overlap- one might say yes. Look at robin- not all birds have the same characteristics as it - Semantic networks: stored at each node- properties associated with each category, e.g. tree to pine tree, pine tree has all of these properties and a special level is also green - global (subordinate): furniture, vehicle, general: chair, table, bed, car, truck, bicycle, specific (superordinate): kitchen/dining room, single, double, ford, chevy, pickup, van, toad, trail - Shared features at higher level nodes, exceptions at lower level nodes

Design features: major characteristics of language

- Semanticity: language symbols refer to meaningful aspects of real world, table- we know what that refers to - Arbitrariness: symbols do not directly represent the concepts to which they refer - Displacement: language allows for communication of ideas that are distant in time and space (reality), create sci-fi, create time and space outside of reality - Productivity: novel combinations can be infinity produced - Prevarication: language can be used to deceive - Reflectiveness: language can be used to think about and communicate about language

Importance of syntax:

- Sequential arrangement of words is primary in sentence comprehension - Commonly employed word orders (e.g., subject-verb-object) provide expectations that facilitate parsing

Ditmman, Brunye, Mahoney, and Taylor (2009)

- Situation models should be memorable to the degree that they can be simulated from the reader's perspective - A language parallel to the enactment effect - Presented three-sentence discourse scenarios, all with the same structure: Descriptive statement- I am a 20-year-old college student - Occupational activity (with same pronoun)- I work in the college bookstore - Activity with temporal marker (with same pronoun and activity)- Right now, I'm preparing for book buy-back - Independent variables: personal pronoun used in sentences :"I" vs. "You" vs. "He", 24 sentences, 8 with each type of pronoun - Dependent variables: - Recognition memory assessed after 10 minutes or 3 weeks - Measured by sensitivity (ability to discriminate new from old sentences) Response time to make the recognition judgment - Prediction: - Better memory when pronoun "you" is used - Reading "you" as pronoun will lead to embodiment (putting yourself in the situation) - Results: you, sensitivity and response time were best for discourse that featured "you" as a pronoun - A text-comprehension version of the *enactment effect* - Indicating a third party for I or He, but You is referring to me

After sentence, participants had to verify if a related passage (the pitcher threw a ball) was true as quickly as possible

- Slightly longer difference in reaction time for elaborative bridging condition - DV: RT - RT did not differ for bridging inferences and explicitly stated information, inference made at encoding because it's necessary for coherence: Replication of Kintsch (1974) - It is something additional when making elaboration, going beyond info given so takes longer - Elaborative inference passage led to longer RT- inference not made until retrieval

What is creativity

- Solutions that are not only correct, but also novel and useful - Weisberg: "The myth of genius": "Creative achievement can be extraordinary because of the effect it produces, rather than because of the way in which it was brought about." (p. 10) - Experts, highly motivated, search where others ignore, take intellectual risks, persevere in the face of obstacles - Recognize that putting extra effort into things post-failure can get you in a good place - Einstein: The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources

Analogies:

- Solving a problem by using a solution to a related problem: Success requires recognizing similarity and recalling the solution of the analogous problem - Participants were not good at making the connection between the two problems unless a hint was given - What really helped was when participants were getting a specific hint - Analogies can be helpful but we need the skill t recognize the analogy - First condition- poorest performance, analogy condition- performed better but not totally unless also provided the hint

How should reading be taught?

- While-word approach: top-down approach, rote learning of words - Phonics approach*: bottom-up approach, emphasize relationship between letters and sounds, associated with efficiency in acquiring new words and efficiency in comprehension - Whole-language approach: broad top-down emphases, no explicit instruction on sound to letter mapping, guess at unfamiliar words using storyline and illustrations

Emotions and decision making

- Somatic marker hypothesis - Visceral feelings normally guide decision making - Orbitofrontal cortex and central lateral prefrontal cortex store and activate somatic markers of emotions originating in the limbic system - Prefrontal injuries can disrupt ability to use somatic markers of emotion in effective decision making - People use emotions to, in part, make decisions - Damage to frontal cortex don't understand the risks with making decisions- don't alter the decks from which they choose from even when it hurts their chances- shows they are only looking at the final gain win and not thinking about the moment- show increased galvanic skin response- increase in anxiety in normal patients but those with frontal cortex damage don't show this response- significantly less anxiety in response as when compared to controls - Check this more in book- continue to engage in those types of behvaiours- why? - Different emotions can differentiate our responses- remove effect of emotion on decision making- just think about it - Provide one small intervening task and ask you how you feel and then give you the task- simply drawing attention to emotion will eliminate its effect on decision making - Possibility of a loss- will be more risky to avoid losing

Does this represent linguistic ability? Language = following commands?

- Some would say no - They associate labels with objects, but labels are not referential - The label is associated with the object, but does not represent the object in the animal's mind - Could be a consequence of stimulus response - Only perform commands to get reward

Three important aspects

- Sound (Speaking): producing phonemes - Meaning (Semantics): combining words and morphemes - Grammar (syntax): forming phrases

Exemplar approach

- Standard of comparison is a specific example, rather than a generalized representation: multiple examples are stored - *Typicality effects: explained by the frequency with which we encounter a particular exemplar, more typical, more encounters you've likely experienced, more examples you have* - Problem: we can categorize things we haven't seen before even without experience, cellphone category would be huge and inefficient to store every single instance, experience becomes particularly important- inefficient - Priming effects: context serves to activate certain exemplars

Lexicon

- Stored entries for words, including irregulars - Can create tenses based off of morphology

Prototypes: (Rosch and Mervis, 1975)

- Subjects listed features and rated typicality for each item - No single feature shared by all items - Large number of features that apply to some, but not all - Positive relationship between ratings of typicality and the amount of overlap of features- family resemblance - Higher the family resemblance, more typical of the prototype this instance was thought to be - Orange and apple- share many features: high family resemblance/typicality - Tomato and olive- share few features: low family resemblance/typicality

Dual process theory of judgement

- System 1- quickly proposes answers to judgement problems: heuristic - System 2- monitors the quality of those judgements: analytic - Rely on heuristics unless there is a situation in which we need to get it right, care about getting it right, or know that we are being led astray

Evidence for indirect access: van Orden (1987)

- Task: category verification task: - A category (flower) is followed by one of three types of targets: - Category member (e.g., rose), Homophone of category member (e.g., rows), Word with orthographic similarity to category member (e.g., robs) - Dependent variable: Accuracy at indicating if target is a member of the category - Expect people to make mistakes in category member section - Condition where it sounds the same- making significantly more errors - Spelling still matters- mistakes still made- but translating written word into its phonological representation before finding what it means- sound- is more influential - Mistakes are associated with the sound of the written word rather than the nature of the printed word in and of itself

Impeding Creativity: The effect of examples

- Task: design new creatures to inhabit a planet; some shown examples- compared to controls, example group less creative - "We showed you these examples in order to help you think about creating your own original creatures and to get your creative juices flowing. However, we do not want you to copy any aspect of the examples." - Effective immediately, but led to inadvertent plagiarism when participants completed task a day later - Example strained creativity - Instruction to not copy- helped immediately but a day later they reverted to copying features/characteristics of the previously shown drawing- *inadvertent plagiarism*

Fixedness

- Tendency to focus on a specific characteristic that keeps one from reaching the solution - Goals: move one stick to make each statement true - Participants had a harder time with the 2nd and 3rd which involved changing symbols rather than numbers, so we get fixated on the sticks changing the number - Functional fixedness - Goal: place the candles at eye level on a door - You have to use the box that contained the matches as a stand for the candle - Don't think about the box as a separate container to be utilized but fixed on thinking of the box as a storage space for the matches - We often have to overcome fixedness to solve a problem - If matches presented outside the box, the box is more likely to be viewed as a tool rather than a container - Functional fixedness: tendency to use an object in its most familiar or common use - Overcome functional fixedness- creativity

Luo, Johnson, & Gallo (1998)

- Tested direct vs, indirect access by using pseudo-homophones: "chare" (non-word, but phonology identical to chair) - Semantic related task: judge if two words are semantically related: when presented with table, is this word related?- Chare, Chair - Dependent variables: RT to make the judgement, accuracy of the judgement

Perceptual Span

- The amount of text around a fixation point that is effectively covered by eyes - For English: 3 to the left, 15 to the right

Expected value

- The average value, as determined by combining the value of events with their probability of occurrence - Expected value P(W) x V(W) + P(L) x V(L)= 1/6 x $4 + 5/6 x -$1= $-1/6 - Incorporate utility- subjective value- to a particular outcome- leads to wrong decision making

Types of inferences

- The movie was incredibly tense and exciting - Bridget was on the edge of her seat - Inference: Bridget was watching the movie - This is a Bridge inference: constructed to connect two ideas that are not explicitly connected, also termed backward inferences, allows reader to "bridge" current info back to earlier info - Serena held the ticket and watched the cop drive away - "I'll never text and drive again," she thought - Inference: Serena received a ticket for texting while driving - This is a: Causal inference: reader infers the cause of an event they have just read, specific type of bridging inference - Jason felt satisfied as he finished wrapping the tiny box - She's going to love it," he assured himself - Inference: Jason is giving his girlfriend jewelry - This is an: elaborative inference - Adding extra information to representation of text - Forward inference: reader moves "forward" from (i.e., beyond) the text

Singer (1980) presented one of three types of passages

- The pitcher threw the ball to first base. The runner was halfway to second - Explicit presentation of pitcher throwing ball to first - The pitcher threw to first base. The ball sailed into right field. - Bridging inference of pitcher throwing ball to first - The pitcher threw to first base. The runner was halfway to second. - Elaborative inference of pitcher throwing ball to first

Inducing structure:

- There is a fixed relationship between objects that must be uncovered - Example: series extrapolation or analogies - Determine which element comes next: 1 2 8 3 4 6 5 6 ... A B M C D M ... - Which one completes the sequence?

Grammar (Syntax)

- There is a hierarchical structure to sentences - There are rules for what can be combined and how it can be combined

Levels of Representation

- Three levels for the mental representation of discourse - Surface code: the precise wording used (available in STM for brief time) - Text Base (major facts and themes) - Situation model: - The "world" created by the discourse - Combination of information from the discourse and background knowledge of the reader - Involves mentally simulating what is happening in the text - Read a fictional book and see the movie: does it represent what you imagined?

Fixation time determined by how challenging word is to process

- Top-down factors- based on knowledge, experience: - Word frequency: low frequency words receive longer fixation than high frequency words - Word predictability: unpredictable words (based on context) receive longer fixations than predictable words - Age at which word was acquired: the younger you acquired the word, the less time it is fixated

Reading = pattern recognition

- Top-down processing: expectations and knowledge influence processing - Bottom-up processing: Data (the printed text) drives processing - Top down processing is playing a role in the exact same text? Context overrides the ambiguity and makes it easy to interpret the info

Representativeness heuristic

- Typical events of a category are seen as more probable - The probability that A comes from B can be determined by how well A resembles properties of B - Making short cuts in our assessment of determining whether this member is in our category- how close to the prototypical category member to this individual, or whether cause and effect- more likely it produces outcome- more likely to categorize? - People say more likely librarian than farmer even though farmers were more common because the person looked more like a stereotypical librarian - Do people not understand base rates? - We should ignore base rates - Key: randomly selecting someone- so you should only have to attend to base rates but the problem is people ignore probability and look to representative heuristic of qualities given

Validity vs. Truth

- Validity depends on the form of the syllogism - Whether the conclusion follows from the 2 premises - Truth depends on the content of the premises - Consistent with facts, or not - If two premises of valid syllogism are true, the syllogism's conclusion must be true - Are people able to assess validity and in what context do truth and validity interfere with each other - It is hard to judge whether reasoning is "logical" or not - Valid arguments can result in false conclusions (because the premises are not true) - An argument can be invalid even though the premises are true Be careful of "some"

Myth: Text messages are as easy to understand as normal writing

- Varieties of text messages - Orthographic abbreviations: same letters but removing some, please= pls - Phonetic respelling: c u later= see you later - Impact on comprehension? Perhaps minimal.... Important letters still present, phonology somewhat intact

Conclusion

- We have limited understanding of the processes involves in creativity - "Creativity is neither fully controlled and structured nor completely unplanned and unstructured. Creative ideas, concepts, and images can result either from the intentional workings of the human mind or from its spontaneous, intuitive qualities." (R. Finke, 1996, p. 391) - Current research- combination of both of those ^^

Anaphoric reference places strain on immediate memory

- When an anaphor is encounters, a person must think back to (remember) the antecedent - Increasing distance= more difficult comprehension, more difficult to make that connection - Immediate memory span is a good predictor of comprehension Retrieval aided when referenced antecedent: occurs frequently, recently or was first mentioned - Given-new "contract": implicit "agreement" that all communication includes: - Given information: information assumed to be known - New information: information that is assumed to be unknown - "That test next week is going to be really tough: - Given: There's a test next week - New: The test will be tough

Two major dimensions of interest in eye movements

- When they occur (fixation duration) - Where they go (i.e., "landing spots) - On average, 65% of the words are fixated on a written text and varies of the type of word - 80% of content words - 40% of function/filler words - Certain words are fixated for a longer period of time - Flywheel focused on more- no a very common word, combination of two relatively common word, it's a longer word

The professor argued the student's position // was indefensible While the man hunted the deer // ran into the words

- Will take slightly longer because you have to parse differently and go back and see what you missed in parsing the sentence and go back and update - Violating typical simple sentence structure - The implicitly assumes S-V-O structure is violated - MA and LC heuristics do not work, leading to problems in comprehension - Garden-path sentences (those that violate parsimonious processing rules) are associated with: longer reading times, longer fixations, more regressive saccades

Garden-Path (GP) Approach to Parsing

- Word-by-word "path" is followed attempting to fit each successive word within developing syntactic structure - We assume "professor" is subject, "argued" is the verb, and "position" is the object - Readers assume the simplest structure, revising only if proven to be wrong - When you start reading something you will assume it will follow the simplest path possible

Kanzi

- bonobo spontaneously learned lexigraphic communication when it was being taught to his mother

Compensatory model:

a decision making strategy that allows positive attributes to compensate for negative ones - Evaluate pros and cons and come to a decision - Reduction in cognitive dissonance when you overestimate positives of what you picked and overestimate negatives of what you didn't pick

Non-compensatory models:

a decision strategy that rejects alternatives that have negative attributes without considering their positive attributes - Automatically rule out anything with a negative - Ex: elimination by aspects you don't want - Satisficing search: limited capacity to evaluate many alternatives often prevents people from selecting the best alternative and settling for a good alternative - Participants had to decide between which of two cars to buy- 4 characteristics or 12, in the 4 you did better if you were busy, in the 12 chose better option when not busy? - Descriptive depends on what the person needs to get out of the option- for compensatory and non-compensatory

Mindblindness:

an inability to understand that others possess mental representations; seem to underlie the failures in social communications found in autism, individuals fail to appreciate the mental environment of other people, lack of joint attention, lack of understanding that I have the intention to draw your attention over here

Spelling doesn't matter: "study" at Cambridge University, claim:

any jumbles arrangement can be recognized if: seen within a context, first/last letters present

Phonemes:

basic sounds- make up morphemes

Framing effects- Tversky and Kahneman (1981)

decisions are influenced by how a problem is stated: - Same contingencies but formed in manners of a loss or a gain - People pick A because it tells you how many people will be saved because in B you have to use the probability to calculate outcome and so people get lazy and just assume that A is correct - D was picked more because it seems like less than 400 because people have to calculate and don't so they assume it is less than 400 (C) - All 4 are saying the same thing- irrational to choose one over the other - Gain or loss influences whether or not one will take risks

Well-defined:

have a correct answer, certain procedures will lead to a solution, used for research

Sentence Parsing:

identification of a sentence's component elements and their grammatical relation to one another - A seamless (i.e., unconscious) process - Influenced by both syntactic (sentence structure) and semantic (meaning-based) factors

Experts:

individuals who are extremely knowledgeable or skilled in a particular field - Domain-specific knowledge: knowledge about a particular subject - Solve problems faster and at a higher rate of success than beginners/novices - What might account for these difference?

Ill-defined:

no one "correct answer", path to the solution is unclear, getting from A to B is unclear, can't really be studied in research because if you don't know the correct answer, how can you test it? Need to be able to operationalize

Inductive reasoning:

premises are based on observation of one or more specific cases - We generalize from these cases to more general conclusions with varying degrees of certainty - Conclusions are suggestions, but not definite - Strength of arguments influences how likely conclusion is to be true - The more evidence you gain that supports or goes against your original argument will strengthen your argument

Morpheme:

smallest unit of language that carries meaning, words, or an s that you add to the end of a word

Theory of mind:

the human ability to infer that others, like ourselves, have mental states, by age 4, children can not only pretend but can predict the consequences of another having false beliefs - Lack of theory of mind may be underlying behaviours seen in autism - Lying

Ad hoc categories

those formed in the service of some goal - members of the category cohere only by virtue of their relation to the context at hand - asking for things to take on vacation would lead to consistent responses across individuals within a particular cultural context, suggesting that we can form categories "on the fly," given a particular goal - formed for a purpose - in similarity scheme- members of ad hoc categories would seem to be pretty low in terms of their similarity - it seems that, other than all belonging to the ad hoc categories things people take on vacations, there's virtually nothing in common among suitcases, swimsuits, cameras, and books - less coherent is the metaphorical concept e.x. emotional prison- an unrewarding job, a relationship that can't be ended for some reason, or a person who can't share some dark secret - the specific situations underlying this three category members may be radically different, yet there is a common underlying theme that unites them

Descriptive models:

what people actually do

Normative models:

what people should do

Anaphoric reference:

when a current expression refers to something that was encountered earlier in a text, often occurs in the context of using pronouns - Parts of anaphoric reference: - Anaphor is the referring expression ("his favorite group") - Antecedents are the events that correspond to the expression (Greg) - Allows for integration of discourse currently being read with previous information already read