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MCAT psych/soc > chapter 5 > Flashcards

chapter 5 Flashcards

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1
Q

what is the information processing model of cognition

A
  • this perspective views the mind as being like a computer that receives data, processes it, stores some of it, and make’s decisions based on how it’s processed
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2
Q

what is the psychological paradigm of behaviourism

A
  • asserted that only behaviour could be studied scientifically and avoided any speculation about internal states
  • Behaviorism focuses on the idea that all behaviors are learned through interaction with the environment. This learning theory states that behaviors are learned from the environment, and says that innate or inherited factors have very little influence on behavior.
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3
Q

what is Jean Piget’s impact?

A
  • spent decades on research output from the 1920’2 till he died in the 1980’s that had a profound impact on developmental psychology
  • most famous for propsing a set of developmental stages that every child passes through on their way to adulthood
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4
Q

what is the first stage proposed by Piaget and what is it?

A
  • the sensorimototr stage which extends from birth till 2 years old
  • the point at which a child really starts to acquire language in earnest
  • object permanance is important in this stage which means understanding that objects exist outside of one’s perception (things don’t go away when you stop seeing them)
  • circular reactions- intentional repetition of something that either happened accidentally or had an interesting effect
  • stranger anxiety- strangers provoke intense worry
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5
Q

What is the 2nd stage proposed by Piget?

A
  • the preoperational stage which lasts from 2-7 yeras of age
  • children represent objects symbolically, using words and images, and take part in very vivid imaginative play based on those representation, but can only engage in very minimal logical thinking
  • egocenterism (difficulty imagining the world from the perspective of others)
  • centration (tendency to focus on a single parameter of an object to the exclusion of others so if they get 2 pieces of chocolate that are smaller than one piece given to someone else, they still think they have more)
  • lack the ability to understand conservation (the idea that the same amount of substance is preserved even as it is transferred between containers with different shapes)
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6
Q

what is the 3rd stage proposed by Piget

A

the concrete operational stage which lasts from 7-11

  • children make dramatic steps forward in abstract reasoning, but only as applied to concrete objects
  • develop understanding of conservation
  • lose egocentrism and become more skilled at solving problems that involve taking others’ perspectives into consideration
  • develop logical reasoning skills (concrete objects)
  • perform better with inductive tasks (generalizing logical conclusions based on empirically observed phenomena than with deductive tasks, which involve applying logical principles to make predictions in a top-down way
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7
Q

what is the 4th stage proposed by Piget

A

formal operation stage which lasts from 11-16 and persists into adulthood

  • the ability to fully engage in abstract knowledge kicks in (handle hypotheticlas, reason abstractly, and make nuanced moral judgements)
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8
Q

shcema definition

A
  • refers to a cognitive framework that organizes information about things one perceives in the outside world, with implications for the actions that can be taken in response
  • ex. Understanding cows as animals with black-and-white splotches that produce milk. if you then encounter an animal that otherwise looks and functions like a cow, but is brown, then you have 2 options:
    • conclude that animal is a cow (assimilation)
    • expand your schema by acknowledging that cows can have additional colours (accomodation)
  • Piaget posits that these processes are at work from early childhood to adulthood
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9
Q

Fluid intelligence is?

A
  • refers to problem-solving skills that can be applied to new situations without any previously existing knowledge
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10
Q

crystallized intelligence is?

A
  • reflects the ability to deploy one’s knowledge and skills to solve problems
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11
Q

what is dementia?

A

when cognitive decline and memory impedements interfere with a person’s ability to function in the world

  • constellation of symptoms that may have multiple causes
    • most famous cause is Alzheimer’s disease which involves the formation of beta-amyloid plaques in the brain
    • can also be caused by tiny brain bleeds or micro-strokes or in response to other conditions that affect the brain
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12
Q

Lev Vytgotsky emphasized what?

A
  • emphasized the role played in cognitive development by feedback, input, and assistance from people surrounding a child with clear implications for cultural factors in development
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13
Q

what is trial and error

A
  • a way to solve problems where we more or less just try different options and see what works
  • useful when we understand the problem we’re trying to solve enough to come up with a workable space of possible solutions, but not enough to predict the exact solution
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14
Q

what is an algorithm?

A
  • a problem-solving technique that involves applying a fixed set of steps
    • alot of thought and insight go into designing an algoeithm
      *
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15
Q

what is the deductive approach to solve problems?

A
  • is top-down approach
  • involves applying general principles to a specific situation
    • ex. if trying to find a drug that will interact with a certain receptor, we might notice that its active site is rich in positively-charged residues, and apply the general principle that opposite charges attract to predict that a negatively-charged molecule would interact with that receptor
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16
Q

what is the inductive approach to problem solving?

A
  • bottom-up process
  • where successive observations are exrapolated to identify general principles
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17
Q

difference between deductive and inductive reasoning

A

Inductive reasoning moves from specific observations to broad generalizations

and deductive reasoning the other way around (from general to specific)

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18
Q

what are analogies

A
  • problem-solving tools where we recognize that a new problem is similar to a problem that we’ve seen before and then solving the new problem in the same way that we solved the old one
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19
Q

what is intuition

A

a way to solve problems where we have a gut sense on how to solve a problem

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20
Q

what is insight

A
  • insight occurs when a solution to a problem presents itself quickly and without warning. It is the sudden discovery of the correct solution following incorrect attempts based on trial and error
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21
Q

what are the barriers to solving problems?

A
  • mental set (framework we use for conceptualizing a problem and trying to solve it)
  • fixation (refers to getting stuck in our old ways of thinking about things
  • functional fixedness (describes a tendency to see objects as only having a certain function- the one they were designed for) - found using Duncker’s candle problem experiment
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22
Q

what is belief perseverance

A
  • people’s tendency to maintain their beliefs or strengthen them in the face of contradictory evidence
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23
Q

what is over confidence?

A
  • being too sure of oneself and can interfere with solving problems effectively
    • underconfidence can also be an impediment to problem solving
24
Q

what are cognitive biases

A
  • systematic, generally subconcious patterns of thought that skew our reasoning
25
Q

what is confirmation bias?

A
  • occurs when we reason in a way that favours information that supports conclusions we have already made, or beliefs that we already have
26
Q

what is Hindsight bias?

A
  • refers to our tendency to retrospectively view events as having been highly predictable even if it wasn’t so simple in the moment
27
Q

what is causation bias?

A
  • refers to our tendency to infer cause-and-effect relationships incorreclty either because one event follows another or because 2 events tend to co-occur
28
Q

what are heuristics?

A
  • defined as mental shortcuts: more or less fixed cognitive processes that we use to solve problems rapidly and/or in situations where we have incomplete information
  • similar to biases but they are themselves problem solving methods
29
Q

what is the representativeness heuristic

A
  • used when we make decisions absed on what we consider to be the prototypical example of a category
    • linked to stereotypes
30
Q

what is the logic of the availability heuristic?

A
  • involves reasoning about the probability or likelihood of a certain event and being influenced by examples of a certain phenomenon that come to mind quickly
    • ex. medical students associate every slight symptom as a sign of a rare and serious disease
31
Q

what is the difference between the representative heuristic and the availability heuristic?

A
  • the representativeness heuristic must refer to some assessment of what’s typical, or a certain stereotype, while the availability heuristic must refer to something in recent memory or that immediately comes to mind
32
Q

Charles Spearman’s thinking about intelligence

A
  • he saw that children who do well in one subject do well in a different one that has nothing to do with the first one and the underlying capacity for this is general intelligence (G factor)
    • heritability of 50% for g factor
33
Q

Francis Galton’s view on intelligence

A
  • hereditary genius (eugenics)
34
Q

Who created IQ (intelligence quotient)

A
  • Alfred Binet
    • defined as a child’s mental age divided by his or her chronological age x 100
    • IQ tests now reflect an estimate of general intelligence, including both fluid and crystallized intelligence
35
Q

what is normal distribution with IQ?

A
  • IQ shows a standard bell curve distrubution, with most people ahaving scores clusterd around the mean and fewer and fewer having more extreme scores
  • 68% of the population has an IQ between 85 and 115vand 85% if the population has an IQ between 70 and 130
36
Q

what is the Flynn effect?

A
  • describes how IQ scores steadily increased in many developed countries throughout the 20th century before peaking in the 1990’s
    • could be due to environmental factors
37
Q

what is the theory of multiple intelligences?

A

Multiple intelligences is a theory first posited by Harvard developmental psychologist Howard Gardner in 1983 that suggests human intelligence can be differentiated into eight modalities

38
Q

what is emotional intelligence

A

we understand our feelings amd those of others around us

39
Q

what is phonetics?

A
  • deals with the speech sounds that we produce
40
Q

what is phonology?

A
  • deals with how we structure and organize speech sounds in ways that do affect meaning, as well as processes that affect such sounds
41
Q

what is morphology?

A
  • in the field of linguistics which refers to the study of how words are formed
42
Q

what is the field of semantics?

A
  • specializes in meaning, either on the level of words or sentences
43
Q

what is the field of pragmatics?

A
  • the analysis of non-literal meaning
    • lies, half truths, etc. in what we speak to others
44
Q

what do phonetics and phonology mean in sign language?

A
  • refer to the physical motion of the hands in sign language and how words are physically articulated
45
Q

what is the psychological school of behavioursim

A
  • pioneered by BF Skinner
  • this approach focused exclusively on observable behaviour, and thought of learning strcitly in terms of concrete behaviour that emerged in response to rewards or punishments
46
Q

what is the learning theory of language?

A

BF Skinner states that language is a learned behaviour that develops in response to environmental stimuli and responses

  • tore down by Noam Chomsky
47
Q

what is the nativist theory of language acquisition?

A
  • Naom Chomsky places a strong emphasis on the idea that humans have a hard-wired neural capacity for learning langauge
    • views the so called language acquisition device as a general capacity distributed throughout the brain
48
Q

what is generative linguistics?

A
  • Noam Chomsky
  • posits deep, underlying, and somewhat abstract linguistics structures that undergo transformations to generate the structures that we produce and speak
49
Q

what is the interactionist theory?

A

a theory that places greater empahsis on how children interact with their environment

50
Q

what is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis/linguistic relativity?

A

the idea that grammatical categories and volcabulary of the langauge that we speak can shape our congition

  • always links to cognition
51
Q

what does linguistic determinism mean?

A

language dictates thought

52
Q

what is aphasia?

A
  • blanket term that refers to an impaired ability to communicate, and depending on the specific pattern of dysfunction, several types have been identified
53
Q

What is Wernicke’s aphasia?

A
  • affected individuals can speak fluently, but what they say doesn’t typically make sense, and they have great difficulty with language comprehension
    • if a person suffers an issue that disrupts Wernicke’s area, it can knock out their ability to understand language or make sense, but can still produce sentences with ease (fluent aphasia) and receptive aphasia because this disorder involves problems understanding
54
Q

what is Brocca’s aphasia

A
  • affected individuals can understand spoken language with no major problems, but have extreme difficulty producing language
    • also known as non-fluent aphasia
55
Q

information gets from Wernicke’s area to Broca’s area through the?

A

arcuate fasciculus and damage to this structure leads to conduction aphasia which involves difficulty repeating words

56
Q

generally speaking, regions in the (what lobe) tend to handle language-related processing functions and includes the?

A

temporal lobe and the auditory cortex

MCAT psych/soc (12 decks)

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