Ch.8

Question 1

Thinking

Answer 1

any mental activity or processing of information, including learning, remembering, perceiving, communicating, believing, and deciding

Question 2

Cognitive economy

Answer 2

Allows us to simplify what we attend to and keep the information we need for decision making to a manageable minimum.

-We draw inferences that provide mental shortcuts. Most of these guesses we call intuitive or system 1 thinking.

• Brains have adapted by finding ways to streamline the cognitive tasks.
• Invests as little mental energy as possible unless it’s necessary to do more.
• Reduce our mental effort but enable us to get things right most of the time.
• occasionally get us in trouble, leads us not merely to simplify but oversimplify.

Question 3

Cognitive biases

Answer 3

Systematic error in thinking.

• Heuristics, predispositions, deflator expectations.

Question 4

representativeness heuristic

Answer 4

Heuristic that involves judging the probability of an event by its superficial similarity to a prototype (stereotype)

Question 5

Base rate

Answer 5

Term for how common a behaviour or characteristics is In general.

Ex: when evaluating probability that a person belongs to a category (math major), we need to consider not only how similar that person is to other members of the category but also how prevalent that category is overall.

Question 6

availability heuristic

Answer 6

heuristic that involves estimating the likelihood of an occurrence based on the ease with which it comes to our minds

Question 7

hindsight bias

Answer 7

our tendency to overestimate how well we could have predicted something after it has already occurred

Question 8

confirmation bias

Answer 8

which is our tendency to seek out evidence that supports our hypotheses or beliefs and to deny, dismiss, or distort evidence that doesn’t

Question 9

Top-down processing

Answer 9

brains have evolved to streamline processing in other ways besides heuristics and biases. One key example is that we fill in the gaps of missing information using our experience and background knowledge.

Question 10

Bottom up processing

Answer 10

We can contrast top-down processing with bottom-up processing, in which our brain processes only the information it receives, and constructs meaning from it slowly and surely by building up understanding through experience.

Question 11

Examples of top-down processing

Answer 11

Chunking- organize info into larger units.

Concepts- our knowledge and ideas about objects, actions, and characteristics that share core properties.

Schemas- are concepts we’ve stored in memory about how certain actions, objects, and ideas relate to each other. Enable us to know roughly what to expect in a given situation and to draw in our knowledge when we encounter something new. Build a standard script

Question 12

decision making

Answer 12

the process of selecting among a set of possible alternatives

Question 13

System 1 and system 2 thinking

Answer 13

1: rapid and intuitive

2: explicit and deliberate

Question 14

Framing

Answer 14

The way a question is formulated that can influence the decisions people make

Question 15

problem solving

Answer 15

generating a cognitive strategy to accomplish a goal

Question 16

Algorithms

Answer 16

step-by-step learned procedure used to solve a problem

-come in handy for problems that depend on the same basic steps for arriving at a solution every time the solution is required.

-ensure that we address all steps when we solve a problem, but they’re pretty inflexible.

Question 17

Subproblems

Answer 17

flexible approach is to break down a problem into subproblems that are easier to solve.

By breaking down the problem into bite-sized chunks, we can often solve it more quickly and easily.

Question 18

Reasoning from related problems

Answer 18

Another effective approach involves reasoning from related examples

Question 19

Analogies

Answer 19

Drawing analogies between two distinct topics. These analogies solve problems with similar structures.

Question 20

Salience of surface similarities

Answer 20

Salience refers to how attention-grabbing something is. We tend to focus our attention on the surface-level (superficial) properties of a problem,

Ignoring the surface features of a problem and focusing on the underlying reasoning needed to solve it can be challenging.

Question 21

Mental sets

Answer 21

Once we find a workable solution that’s dependable, we often get stuck in that solution mode; we have trouble generating alternatives or “thinking outside the box.”

Question 22

functional fixedness

Answer 22

Difficulty conceptualizing that an object typically used for one purpose can be used for another

-can also occur when have little to no experience with the objects

Solution: shift attention from overall problem to smaller, even somewhat obscure details

Question 23

language

Answer 23

largely arbitrary system of communication that combines symbols (such as words or gestural signs) in rule-based ways to create meaning.

• language is arbitrary
• Language serves key social and emotional functions, too. It enables us to express our thoughts about social interactions,

Question 24

phoneme

Answer 24

category of sounds our vocal apparatus produces

• any of the perceptually distinct units of sound in a specified language that distinguish one word from another

-“the ingredients”

Question 25

morpheme

Answer 25

smallest meaningful unit of speech

• convey info about semantics (meaning derived from words and sentences)
• a meaningful morphological unit of a language that cannot be further divided

-“the menu items”

-created by stringing phonemes together

• Morphological markers are elements that modify words by adding sounds to them. Like s, Ed, ing

Question 26

syntax

Answer 26

grammatical rules that govern how words are composed into meaningful strings

-“putting meal together”

• includes morphological markers and sentence structure.

Question 27

extralinguistic information

Answer 27

elements of communication that aren’t part of the content of language but are critical to interpreting its meaning

-“the overall dining experience”

-includes nonverbal cues, facial expression, posture, gestures, tone of voice

Question 28

sound symbolism

Answer 28

the fact that certain speech sounds seem to be ass ociated with particular meanings challenges the idea of language as completely arbitrary

Question 29

Timeline of children learning a language

Answer 29

Note: Babies/children who learn sign languages pass through the same developmental stages at about the same ages as babies who learn spoken languages. This also includes babies/children learning 2 languages.

Before 1st year:

• begin to under phonemes from womb around 5 months

• figure out the phonemes of their language and how to use their vocal apparatus to make specific sounds. = babbling

1st year:

• Start to produce their first words around their first birthdays. Acquire their first words slowly.

• start off speaking in the one-word stage.
— use just individual words to convey entire thoughts.

• between 12 and 18 months of age, they gradually accumulate a vocabulary of between 20 and 100 words.

• Comprehend some basic syntactic rules before they can display them.

2nd year:

• can produce several hundred words.

• simple two-word phrases.

• At this stage have already grasped something about syntactic rules.
— tend to use words in the correct order, even if they’re leaving some of them out.

• Several months after they’ve begun using two-word phrases, children use more complex sentences involving three and four-word combinations.

• Around the same time, they begin to produce morphological markers such as s for plural and ed for past tense in English.

Past 2nd year:

• By kindergarten, their vocabularies have ballooned to several thousand words.

Question 30

Babbling

Answer 30

intentional vocalization that lacks specific meaning

• sounds other than crying, burping, sighing, and laughing, which are less intentional

Question 31

overextend and underextend

Answer 31

Children typically make some mistakes in interpreting what words mean and how to use them.

• Applying words in a broader sense
— overextension, such as referring to all flying objects as “birds”

• In a narrower sense
— underextension, such as thinking that the word cat applies only to their pet cat

Question 32

One-word stage

Answer 32

early period of language development when children use single-word phrases to convey an entire thought

Question 33

Do children understand syntactic rules before being able to apply them?

Answer 33

• Children comprehend some basic syntactic rules before they can display them.

• they understand how word order relates to meaning before they can generate complete sentences.

Question 34

Sign language

Answer 34

Language developed by members of a community with hearing loss that uses visual rather than auditory communication.

• Involves using the hands, face, body, and “sign space” — the space immediately in front of the signer-to communicate.

• linguistic system of communication with its own phonemes, words, syntax, and extralinguistic information.

• same brain areas involved in processing spoken languages become active in signers

Question 35

Common Misconceptions about Sign
Language

Answer 35

1. PEOPLE WITH HEARING LOSS DON’T NEED SIGN LANGUAGE BECAUSE THEY CAN LIP READ.

— Most skilled lip readers can pick up only about 30 to 35 percent of what’s being said because most of the work is done behind the scenes by the throat, tongue, and teeth.

2. LEARNING TO SIGN SLOWS DOWN THE ABILITY OF CHILDREN WITH HEARING LOSS TO LEARN TO SPEAK.

— “total communication” approach works best: Learning a sign language actually speeds up the process of learning to talk

3. AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE IS JUST ENGLISH TRANSLATED WORD FOR WORD INTO SIGNS.

— (ASL) bears no resemblance to English; the syntax differs completely.

— Signed English: Translates English sentences word for word into signs from ASL.

Question 36

Critical periods

Answer 36

• Studies of second-language acquisition focus on if there is a critical period for developing language.

• Critical periods are windows of time in development during which an organism must learn an ability if it’s going to learn it at all.

• Age-of-exposure effects are more dramatic for syntax and pronunciation than for vocabulary

Question 37

Have psychologies found evidence for a critical period?

Answer 37

• No evidence in humans for strict critical periods, at least when it comes to language.

• A sensitive period, an interval during which people are more receptive to learning and can acquire new knowledge more easily.

• Don’t fully understand why older children and adults are less capable of learning new languages than younger children.
— Elissa Newport’s “less is more” hypothesis

Question 38

generative

Answer 38

Allowing an infinite number of unique sentences to be created by combining words in novel ways

• language isn’t just a set of predefined sentences that we can pull out and apply in appropriate contexts. Instead, it’s a system that allows us to create an infinite number of sentences, producing new statements, thoughts, and ideas never previously uttered.

Question 39

The pure nature and nurture accounts

Answer 39

• Language learned through imitation.
— most parsimonious hypothesis.

• Babies hear language used in systematic ways and learn to use language as adults use it.

• Purely imitation-based explanation is unlikely b/c of generative.

Question 40

The nativist account

Answer 40

• nativist: account of language acquisition that suggests children are born with some basic knowledge of how language works

— although the precise rules for their native language need to be determined through exposure.

Con

• claims are difficult to falsify.

• it’s hard to think of an outcome that nativists couldn’t explain.

— A theory that can explain every conceivable outcome essentially explains nothing.

Question 41

The social pragmatically account

Answer 41

Account of language acquisition that proposes that children infer what words and sentences mean from context and social interactions.

Cons:

• Explaining child language on the basis of social understanding requires us to assume that infants understand a great deal about how other people are thinking.

• we can explain most social pragmatic abilities without requiring as much insight on the part of the child.
— Caretaker points to a specific object, they utter the same word. In this way, children may infer that pointing is correlated with word meaning. This deduction doesn’t require children to consider the social context or communicative intentions of others.

Question 42

The general cognitive processing account

Answer 42

Proposes that children’s ability to learn language results from general skills that children apply across a variety of activities.

— Ability to perceive, learn, and recognize patterns may be all they need to learn language.

Cons:

• children are better at learning languages than adults, whereas adults are better at learning things in general.

• specific areas of the brain, left temporal lobe more active in language processing than in other types of learning, memory, and pattern recognition activities.
— finding implies that at least some distinct cognitive processes occur during language as opposed to other cognitive activities.

Question 43

How animals communicate

Answer 43

• Have a fixed number of ways of expressing a fixed number of messages but no means of communicating completely new ideas.

• In most nonhuman animals, the two circumstances in which communication most often takes place are sex and violence.

• For their purposes, they’re every bit as effective in their communication as we are.

Question 44

Written language

Answer 44

• must be taught and practised.

• eventually becomes an automatic process, one that doesn’t consume our attentional resources, except when it’s challenging or engaging.

Question 45

Stroop colour-naming task

Answer 45

This task requires participants to identify the colour of ink used to print words.

The catch is that the printed words are colour names that contradict the ink colour

Question 46

whole word recognition

Answer 46

reading strategy that involves identifying common words based on their appearance without having to sound them out

Question 47

phonetic decomposition

Answer 47

reading strategy that involves sounding out words by drawing correspondences between printed letters and sounds

Question 48

Bandwagon effect

Answer 48

is the tendency for people to adopt certain behaviors, styles, or attitudes simply because others are doing so.

Question 49

Issues with teaching human language to nonhuman animals

Answer 49

• teaching chimps to speak
— Organutans exhibited something resembling human like vocal control.

Con:
• chimpanzees vocal apparatus doesn’t permit anywhere near the range and coordination of sounds we can achieve.

• Lexigram board and sign language
— required many trials with reinforcement to learn the associations between signs or Alexigrams and their meanings.

Cons: (applies to chimps, bonobos, African gray parrot)
• only learned a limited vocabulary.
• never mastered syntactic rules