Psy 452: Exam 4

Conversational postulates [cooperative principle, Gricean maxims]

*Cooperative principle*: the assumption that participants in a conversation normally attempt to be informative, truthful, relevant, and clear. *Gricean maxims*: Quantity, quality, relation, manner which means • Be informative, tell the truth, be relevant, be clear

Dominic is at a job interview sitting across from the company's CEO, Bing. While she takes a phone call, Dominic tries to recall her first name. Her business card is on the desk, but its orientation is not facing Dominic straight on. The business card has the initial of Ms. Bing's first name, so Dominic mentally rotates that initial letter into a straight-up orientation. For which angle (compared to the final straight-up orientation) would you predict Dominic would be fastest in identifying the initial?

30 degrees

Functional fixedness

A cognitive bias that limits a person to using an object only in the way it is traditionally used. Dunker (1945) Given a candle, thumb tacs, and a box of matches

Gestalt approach

Characterized by reconstructing insight. A school of thought that believes all objects and scenes can be observed in their simplest forms.

Ambiguity in language

Context, ettiquette, cooperation

Paivio and paired-associate learning

Did an experiment pairing abstract and concrete words. Those who paired both concrete-concrete words did best. More evidence: mental rotation (Shepard & Metzler)

Paivio (1963) proposed the conceptual peg. His work suggests which of the following would be most difficult to remember? Apple pie America Baseball Freedom

Freedom

Methodological issues in the study of imagery

Image scanning No one actually told to scan The longer the distance, the harder to identify Can't rule out that motives (unconscious) and belief govern behavior

Suppose we ask people to perform the following cognitive Which is LEAST likely to strongly activate the visual cortex? Imagine the meaning of the word "ethics" Imagine your car first from far away and then how it looks as you walk closer to it Imagine a typical unsharpened pencil. Approximate its length in inches Imagine a tic-tac-toe game proceeding from start to finish

Imagine the meaning of the word "ethics"

Brain imaging and imagery

Kosslyn et al. (1993) PET study - Early form of imaging suggested posterior part of the brain is active during visual mental imagery Le Bihan et al. (1993) fMRI primary visual cortex - No real difference with imagined stimulus and actual stimulus; no change in anything outside the visual cortex

Core attributes of language

Language is universal across cultures (Many different languages, but all human cultures develop one) Drive for language (Need to communicate drives development of "languages" ) Progression in language development is similar across languages Languages have similarities (Use words [nouns and verbs], make things negative, ask questions)

Motor imagery

Motor imagery can have a positive effect on subsequent performance of the same action. Imagining how you're going to play the song on a violin helps with performance. Imagining a movement (in a first person sense) activates some of the same brain regions used for real movements. Feltz & Landers (1983) meta-analysis • Found overall effect size = .48

Phases of the imagery debate

Nature of representativeness Methodological issues Cognitive neuroscience

Imageless thought controversy

Not a new issue Wundt and Aristotle believed that imagery = thought

Gick and Holyoak consider which of the following to be the most difficult step to achieve in the process of analogical problem solving? Solving the problem through reorganization because past experience can make it more difficult to reorganize a problem Noticing that there is an analogous relationship between problems because most participants need prompting before they notice a connection Mapping corresponding parts between the problems because the elements are difficult to identify Applying the mapping to generate a parallel solution because of the difficulty in generalizing from one problem to another

Noticing that there is an analogous relationship between problems because most participants need prompting before they notice a connection

Base rates

Probability of an event happening based on past evidence

Propositions vs Pictorial representations

Propositions: Abstract way to specify unambiguously the meaning of assertions Pictoral: just mental images

In a study, participants listened to the following tape recording: Rumor had it that, for years, the government building had been plagued with problems. The man was not surprised when he found several spiders, roaches, and other bugs in the corner of the room. As participants heard the word "bugs," they completed a lexical decision task to a test stimulus flashed on a screen. To which of the following words would you expect participants to take the longest to respond to? SPY SKY ROACH ANT

SKY

Consider the following argument: Observation: Here in Nashville, the sun has risen every morning. Conclusion: The sun is going to rise in Nashville tomorrow.

The argument is strong because there are a large number of observations

Which statement below is most closely associated with the early history of the study of imagery? Imagery is closely related to language Imagery is based on spatial mechanisms like those involved in perception People can rotate images of objects in their heads Thought is always accompanied by imagery

Thought is always accompanied by imagery

Differences in imagery

US Air Force pilots better mental rotation than nonpilots (other areas were not better) ASL fluent individuals skilled at looking at scene and rotation through 180 degrees

An experiment on the phonemic restoration effect would most likely include

an extraneous cough

The text's discussion of the research on in vivo problem solving highlighted that_________ play(s) an important role in solving scientific.

analogies

The radiation problem was used in your text to illustrate the role of _______ in problem solving

analogy

Boxing champion George Foreman recently described his family vacations with the statement, "At our ranch in Marshall, Texas, there are lots of ponds and I take the kids out and we fish. And then of course, we grill them." That a reader understands "them" appropriately (George grills fish, not his kids!) is the result of a(n) __________ inference.

anaphoric

The typical purpose of subgoals is to

bring the problem solver closer and closer to the goal state

Given its definition, expected utility theory is most applicable to deciding whether to

buy first class or coach tickets for a spring break trip

In the lexical decision task, participants are asked to

decide whether a string of letters is a word or a non-word

In the movie Apollo 13, astronauts aboard a damaged spacecraft have to build a carbon dioxide filter out of random items that are aboard the ship with If they do not, they will all die rapidly of carbon dioxide poisoning. The fact that they are able to do so with the help of experts on Earth is similar to the___________ approach developed by Ronald Finke.

divergent thinking

Tanenhaus and coworkers' eye movement study presented participants with different pictures for interpreting the sentence, "Put the apple on the towel in the " Their results showed the importance of in how we understand sentences in real-life situations.

environmental context

Mental imagery involves

experiencing a sensory impression in the absence of sensory input

Language consists of smaller components, like words, that can be combined to form larger ones, like phrases, to create sentences, which themselves can be components of a larger This demonstrates the property of language.

hierarchical

A researcher records a brainstorming session in an industrial research and development department rather than in an artificial laboratory Later, she analyzes the recorded discussions, identifying certain problem-solving techniques. This research is an example of......research.

in vivo problem-solving

Chaz is listening to his grandma reminisce about the first time she danced with his grandpa 60 years When his grandma says, "It seemed like the song would play forever," Chaz understands that it is more likely his grandma was listening to a radio playing and not a CD. This understanding requires Chaz use a(n)

instrument interference

The "imagery debate" is concerned with whether imagery

is based on spatial or language mechanisms

When we look at a record of the physical energy produced by conversational speech in a person's native language, we see that the speech signal

is continuous

In drawing conclusions about the relationship between imagery and perception, a notable difference between them is that

it is harder to manipulate mental images then perceptual images

The analogical paradox refers to problem-solving differences between

laboratory and real-world settings

The solution to the candle problem involves realizing that the

match box can be used as a shelf

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

Utility refers to

outcomes that achieve a person's goals

B.F. Skinner, the modern champion of behaviorism, proposed that language is learned through

reinforcement

Imagine that your friend James has just taken up the habit of smoking cigars because he thinks it makes him look You are concerned about the detrimental effects of smoking on his health, and you raise that concern to him. James gets a bit annoyed with your criticism and says "George Burns smoked cigars, and he lived to be 100!" You might point out that a major problem with his "George Burns" argument involves

sample size

Kosslyn interpreted the results of his research on imagery (such as the island experiment) as supporting the idea that the mechanism responsible for imagery involves _______ representations.

spatial

Insight

the "aha" moment

Illustrative of functional fixedness, people are more likely to solve the candle problem if

the box is empty

According to your text, the key to solving the Wason four-card problem is

the falsification principle

Cecile has dreamed of owning her own home for years, and she can finally afford a small cottage in an older She notices that she feels more positive about her home when she drives home by the abandoned shacks, but she hates her home when driving past the fancy mansions with their large lawns. Cecile's emotions are influenced by

the framing effect

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.

Failing to consider the law of large numbers most likely results in errors concerning

the representativeness heuristic

Dual-code hypothesis

to process, you must code both images and audio

The best description of the purpose of think-aloud protocols is that they are used to determine

what information a person is attending to while solving a problem

People tend to overestimate

what negative feelings will occur following a decision more so than positive feelings

Continuing importance of mental imagery

• The classic example of 'top down' processing • Know a lot about the visual system • Compelling experience • Relatively easy to do • Kosslyn is the central researcher, and one of the founders of cognitive neuroscience