Comparative psychology and imagery

Question 1

What are the two things that a representation consists of?

Answer 1

A referent and sense
Referent - the object or concept being referred to
Sense - the meaning of the representation

Question 2

What are the two types of representations?

Answer 2

Analogue representations - 1:1 relationship between the referent and reality, the representation is the same as it occurs in real life

Propositional/ allegorical representations - arbitrary set of symbols and rules that combine those symbols to represent something

Question 3

What is the brain area responsible for mental maps? What study looked at mental maps?

Answer 3

Hippocampus - London taxi driver study - taxi drivers have bigger hippocampi bc they have to keep a very detailed mental map

Question 4

What is Paivio’s duel coding hypothesis? What is evidence for seperate coding? What is the limitation of this theory?

Answer 4

Information is represented in both a verbal and imaginal (visual) code -> it might be coded or stored in either or both systems.
Concrete words are remembered more as they are coded in both systems (ie. chair), whereas abstract words are only coded in the verbal system (ie. justice).
Limitation - this way of storage would use up all our mental memory space

Question 5

What is Anderson and Bower’s conceptual propositional hypothesis?

Answer 5

We remember the propositional meaning of an event, rather than the actual order of the words spoken -> interpretation of a sentence is stored, not the sentence itself

Question 6

What is evidence for propositional effects in mental imagery?

Answer 6

People were more likely to misremember symbols being in a memory set if they were congruent with the word they were presented with, ie. spectacle

Question 7

What is evidence for analogue effects in mental imagery?

Answer 7

We can visualise exact things ->
Transformations - manipulate an exact mental image in your mind
Size effects - when asked questions about the smaller visualised objects, we have slower reaction time
Image scanning - when asked to visualise moving from one place t another on a map, it takes longer to reach the destination if the actual physical distance is longer

Question 8

What is the functional equivalence hypothesis? What effect demonstrates this?

Answer 8

Imagery and perception function in similar ways and use the same cognitive structures. Mental imagery is not only analogue or propositional, it is both.
The mental rotation effect -> when asked to say if a structure is the same as another, just rotated, the degree of rotation was directly related to reaction time, indicating that we are analogously rotating the structure in our heads.

Question 9

What is evidence that imagery and perception use the same resources?

Answer 9

Rotation aftereffect -> look at spinning disc spinning clockwise, then look at something stationary, it looks like it is rotating anitclockwise -> this effects reaction times on tasks

Interference -> when performing a visual detection task and imagining a visual scene there are more errors than if you were performing a visual detection task and imagining auditory

Lesions an impairments ->
Damage to the right parietal lobe leads to visual neglect syndrome in both visual and imagined stimuli
Occipital lobectomy resulted in reduced image size in visual (tunnel vision) and imagery (tunnel imagery)

Question 10

What is an example of complex prospection?

Answer 10

Mental time travel - the ability to link events across time, and consider multiple, even contradicting, possibilities

Question 11

What is the test for measuring mutually exclusive possibilities?

Answer 11

Drop treat down a tube with two exits, tell the child to catch the treat - if the child covers both exits, they are plannign for mutually exclusive possibilities

Usually seen in kids 3-4 years - other animals do not show this behaviour

Question 12

What are 4 defining characteristics of primates?

Answer 12

Reliance on vision rather than smell - reduced size of the olfactory brain, colour vision, 3D vision
Encepahlised - larger brain related to body size
Five separate digits and fingernails
Mainly omnivorous

Question 13

How much DNA do we share with chimpanzees?

Answer 13

99.4% of tested protein coding DNA base pairs

Question 14

What criticisms did Darwin face?

Answer 14

Issues describing the evolution of mental capacities
Issues describing human’s language capacities

Question 15

Describe an experiment showing that animals have similar neuronal pain-feeling systems.

Answer 15

Give rats sugar water and analgesic water -> healthy rats prefer sugar water over water containing analgesics - rats with chronically inflamed joints prefer water containing analgesics

Question 16

What is the principle of Parsimony? What is Lloyd Morgan’s canon and the Clever Hans phenomenon?

Answer 16

The principle of Parsimony → the simplest explanation is the best one
- Lloyd Morgan’s canon - if you have two possible explanations for animal behaviour, you go for the simplest one unless you have strong evidence of the presence of the other
- Clever Hans phenomenon - trainer was genuinely convinced that the horse Hans could solve mathematics → however, when the questioner did not know the answer or the horse could not see the questioner, he could not answer the question → the horse was simply picking up on cues of the questioner

Question 17

Do great apes show insight?

Answer 17

Yes - demonstrated internal trial and error when they stacked boxes to get a banana, and when they use tools in the wild

Question 18

What is the Machiavellain hypothesis for the evolution of intelligence?

Answer 18

Social intelligence is probably the prime mover for primate intelligence → social intelligence is the selective pressure weeding out intelligent primates

Question 19

What is evidence of primate social intelligence?

Answer 19

• association between neocortex size and group size
• group living - all have individual relationships with other members of the group
• grooming - very important for forming bonds with other primates
• social hierarchies - different from other animals
• keeping track of third party relations
• tactical deceptions
• co-operation to solve problems
• imitation

Question 20

Describe evidence for social inheritance/ culture in great apes.

Answer 20

When behaviours were recorded across the six research sites in Africa, apes from different areas showed different behaviours - including different tool use and arbritrary welcoming behaviours.

Question 21

Which apes passed the self recognition mirror test?

Answer 21

Chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, bonobos, humans - but not Gibbons

Question 22

What was Mueller’s issue with Darwin’s theory?

Answer 22

No other animal species has open ended syntactical language like humans

Question 23

What is pretence? Which animals show evidence of this? What does this tell us, based on homology?

Answer 23

Pretence involves having a primary representation of reality and a secondary representation of pretend world.
Great apes (chimps, orangutans, bononbos, gorillas, humans) show pretence.
Based on homology, this tells us that the great apes shared a common ancestor.