Final (new stuff) Flashcards
Diacrital marks:
Symbols that indicate the correct pronunciation of letters in a particular word.
Articulation:
The production of a language’s sounds.
Recursion:
The capacity of any one component (e.g. phrase or sentence) to contain any number of similar components.
psycholinguistics:
The branch of cognitive psychology interested in how we comprehend, produce, acquire and represent (in the mind) language.
Phoneme:
Smallest unit in language. Phonemes are combined to form morphemes.
Morpheme:
The smallest unit in language that carries meaning.
Syntax:
The rules that govern how words and sentences are structured.
Semantics:
The meaning of words and sentences.
Tree diagram:
A description of a process that proceeds from one level at which a number of relationships are simultaneously present to other levels at which those relationships are ordered serially.
Language:
Open-ended verbal communication that consist of all possible sentences.
Speech:
Those sentences that are actually spoken; only a small subset of language.
Phrase structure rules:
Rules describing the way symbols can be rewritten as other symbols.
Grammatical transformations:
Rules operating on entire strings of symbols to convert them to new strings.
Competence vs performance:
We may have an internalized system of rules that constitutes a basic linguistic competence, but this competence may not always be reflected in our actual use of the language (performance).
Deep and surface structure:
The sequence of words that make up a sentence constitutes a surface structure that is derived from an underlying deep structure.
Innateness hypothesis:
The hypothesis that children innately possess a language acquisition device that comes equipped with principles of universal grammar.
“poverty of the stimulus” argument
The argument that the linguistic environment to which child is exposed is not good enough to enable language acquisition on its own.
Language acquisition device (LAD) and universal grammar hypothesis:
The hypothesis that children possess a language acquisition device containing general principles that apply to any natural language (universal grammar)
Minimalism:
The belief that linguistic competence has only those characteristics that are absolutely necessary.
Parameter-setting hypothesis:
The hypothesis that language acquisition involves the setting of various parameters contained within a universal grammar (e.g. position of verb in relation to object.) A parameter is a universal aspect of language that can take on one of a small set of possible values.
Concealing function hypothesis:
The hypothesis that language is a kind of code, and that the parameters st for one language serve to conceal its meaning from the speakers of another language.
Mirror neurons:
Neurons that fire not only when performing an action, but also when observing an action. Broca’s area in monkeys contains mirror neurons that fire not only when the animal makes grasping movements, but also when it observes other animals making those movements.
Parental reformulations:
Adult reformations of children’s speech. They are negative in that they inform children thet they have made a mistake and positive in that they provide examples of correct speech.
Syntactic development:
Development of the ability to orginize words into grammatical sentences.
Given-new contract:
a tacit agreement whereby the speaker agrees to connect new information to what the listener already knows.
Code model of communication:
A model of communication based on the information-processing theory.
Inferential model of communication:
A model of communication based on Grice’s inferential theory.
co-operative principle:
The assumptions that the speaker intends to say something concise, truthful, relevant, and unambiguous.
Conversational maxims:
Say no more than is necessary (maxim of quantity);
be truthful (maxim of quality);
be relevant (maxim of relation);
and avoid ambiguity (maxim of manner).
Figurative language:
Various figures of speech such as metaphor and irony.
pretense theory of irony:
When speaking ironically, people are only pretending to mean what they say.
Hesitation pauses:
Pauses in speech, often characterised by disfluences such as um or uh.
Egocentric speech:
Speech that does not take the listener’s perspective into acount.
inner speech:
Speech for oneself that regulates throught.
Zone of proximal development:
Defined by Vygotsky as “the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem-solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem-solving under adult guidance or in collaberation with more capable peers.
Metalinguistic awareness:
The ability to talk about language itself, without worrying about what it refers to.
Literacy:
The ability to read and write; sometimes extended to include the metalinguistic ability to talk or write about text.
Surface dyslexia:
A form of dyslexia affecting only the ability to recognize words as entire units; the ability to read words letter by letter remains intact.
Phonological dyslexia:
A form of dyslexia affecting only the ability to read letter-by-letter; the ability to recognize words as entire units remains intact.
Dual route theory:
The theory there are two separate pathways for reading, one for comparing words to a mental dictionary and another for converting letters into sounds together to make words.
Idea density:
The number of distinct ideas present in a sentence or paragraph.
Safir-Whorf Hypothesis:
The hypothesis that two languages may be so different from one another as to make their native speakers’ experience of the world QUALITATIVELY different.
linguistic relativity:
The notion that two languages may be so different from each other as to make their native speakers’ experience of the world QUITE different from each other.
Polysemy
The existence of multiple meanings for one word.
Basic colour terms hypothesis (berlin-Kay order)
The hypothesis that there is an invariant sequence regulating the emergence of colour terms in any language.
Opponent process theory of colour vision:
The hypothesis that colour vision is based on three pairs of antagonistic processes.
Intrinsic frame of reference:
Spatial relationships are based solely on the relationships between the objects being described.
Relative frame of reference:
Spatial relationships are described relative to an observer’s viewpoint.
Absolute frame of reference:
Spatial relationships are described in terms of an invariant set of coordinates.
Gestalt switch:
A sudden change in the way information is organized.
Insight problem:
A problem that we must look at from a different angle before we can see how to solve it.
Production thinking (Wertheimer):
Thinking based on a grasp of the general principles that apply in the situation at hand.
Structurally blind/reproductive thinking:
The tendency to use familiar or routine procedures, reproducing thinking that was appropriate for the current situation.
Analysis of the situation:
Determining what functions the objects in the situation have and how they can be used to solve the problem.
Functional fixedness (Dunker):
The inability to see beyond the most common use of a particular object and recognize that it could also perform the function needed to solve a problem also, the tendency to think about objects based on the function for which they were designed.
Hints:
A hint must be consistent with the direction that the person’s thinking is taking, and cannot be useful unless it responds to a difficulty that the person has already experienced.
Feeling of “Warmth”:
The feeling that many people have as they approach the solution to a problem (i.e getting warm”)
Feeling of knowing:
The feeling that you will be able to solve a particular problem.
Progress monitoring theory:
The theory that we monitor our progress on a problem, and when we reach an insightful solution.
Representational change theory:
The theory that insight requires a change in the way participants represent the problem to themselves.
Constraint relaxation:
An aspect of representational change theory: the removal of assumptions that are blocking problem solution.
Chunk decomposition:
An aspect of change theory: parts of the problem that are recognize as belonging together are separated into “chunks” and thought about independently.
Einstein effect (Luchins):
The tendency to respond inflexibly to a particular type of problem; also called a rigid set.
Negative transfer:
The tendency to respond with previously learned rule sequences even when they are inappropriate.
Strong but wrong routines:
Overwhelmed response sequence that we follow even when we intend to do something else.
Mindfulness vs mindlessness (Langer):
Openness to alternative possibilities versus the tendency to behave as if the situation had only one possible interpretation.
Artificial Intelligence:
The “intelligence of computer programs designed to solve problems in ways that resemble human approaches to problem-solving.
Heuristic:
A problem-solving procedure (typically a rule of thumb or shortcut); heuristics can often be useful, but do not guarantee solutions.
Algorithm:
An unambiguous solution procedure (e.g. the rules governing long division).
Subgoal:
A goal derived from the original goal, the solution of which leads to the solution of the problem as a whole.
Evaluation Function:
The process whereby a plan is created, carried out, and evaluated.
Problem space:
The representation of a problem, including the goal to be reached and the various ways of transforming the given situation into the solution.
search tree:
a representation of all the possible moves branching out from the initial state of the problem.
General problem Solver (GPS):
A computer program used to perform non-systematic searches
Toy problems:
Problems used to analysis the problem-solving process.
Production rules:
A production rules consists of a condition and an action (C–>A)
Means-end analysis :
The procedure used by General Problem Solver to reduce differences between current and goal states.
Goal stack:
The final goal to be reached is on the bottom of the stack, with the subgoals oiled on top of it in which they are to be attained.
Thinking aloud:
Concurrent verbalization the verbalization of information as the participant is attending to it.
Historical accounts, observation of ongoing scientific investigations, laboratory studies and computational models:
Different methods for studying problem-solving in science.
Cognitive history of science:
The study of historically important scientific discoveries in a framework provided by cognitive science
Zeigarnik effect:
The “quasi-need” to finish incomplete tasks.
In vivo/in vitro method (Dunbar)
In the case of scientific problem-solving, in vivo research involves the observation of ongoing scientific investigations, while in vitro research involves laboratory studies of scientific problem-solving.
what do some scientists do with Unexpected findings:
Although scientists may initially resist information that disconfirms favoured hypotheses, successful problem-solvers attempt to explain surprising results.
Distributed reasoning:
Reasoning done by more than one person.
BACON:
A computer system that has been able to discover several well-known scientific laws.
Face validity:
Methods that clearly measure what they are suppose to measure are said to be “face valid”
Motivated reasoning:
Biased evaluation of evidence, inaccordance with one’s prior views and beliefs.
reasoning:
A thought process that yields a conclusion from premises.
Syllogism:
A syllogism consists of two premises and a conclusion. Each of the premises specifies a relationship between two categories.
Logicism:
The beleif that logical reasoning is an essential part of human nature.
Practical syllogism:
One in which two premises point to a conclusion that calls for action.
Relational reasoning:
Reasoning involving premises that express the relations between items (e.g. A is taller than B)
Three-term series problem:
Linear syllogisms consisting of two comparative sentences from which a conclusion must be drawn.
Iconic:
A characteristic of mental models, according to Johnson-Laird’s theory: the relations between the parts of the model correspond to the relations between the parts of the modal correspond to the relations between the parts of the situation it represents.
Emergent consequences:
A principle of Johnson-Laird’s theory: you can get more out of a mental model than you put into it.
Parsimony:
A principle of Johnson-Laird’s theory: people tend to construct the simplest mental model possible.
Natural deduction system:
A reasoning system made up of propositions and deduction rules that are used to draw conclusions from these propositions.
Generative problem:
Participants are told that the three numbers; 2, 4, 6 conform to a simple relational rule that the experimenter has in mind, and that their task is to discover the rule by generating sequences of three numbers. The experimenter tells them each time whether the rule has been followed.
Eliminative strategy:
A strategy based on attempting to falsify your hypotheses, in order to eliminate incorrect beliefs.
Confirmation Bias:
The tendency to seek conformity evidence for a hypothesis.
Selection Task: (Wason)
A four-card problem based on conditional reasoning.
Conditional reasoning:
reasoning that uses conditional (“if…then”) statements.
Truth tables:
A way of presenting the various combinations of the constituents of logical statements.
Social contract theory:
A the theory that iferences procedures have evolved to deal with social contracts in which social contracts in which people give something up in order to gain something else.
Bias:
A predisposition to see a particular type of situation in a particular way.
Law of large numbers:
The larger the sample, the closr a statistic will be to the truth value.
Law of averages:
A fallacy base on the assumption that events of one kind are always balanced by events of another kind.
Gambier’s fallacy:
Themistaken belief that an event that has not occured on several independant trials is more likely to happen on future trials.
Law of small numbers:
The mistaken belief that a small sample should be representative of the population from which it is drawn.
Representativness heuristic:
Making inferences on the assumption that small samples resemble one another and the population from which they are drawn.
Hot-hand belief:
The belief that a player who has just made two or three shots in on a streak and will likely make the next shot.
Hot-hand Behaviour:
A bias that leads the teammates of a player who has just scored a basket to let him take the next shot.
Adjustment and anchoring:
People’s judgements of magnitude are biased (i.e. adjusted) by the initial value to which they are exposed (i.e. anchor).
Availability:
the ease with which something can be brought to mind.
Peak-end rule;
Retrospective judgments of the total painfulness of an event are formed by averaging the pain experienced during the most painful moment of the event and that felt at the end of the event.
Duration neglect:
The finding that retrospective judgments of the total painfulness of an event are unrelated to the event’s duration.
Illusionary correlation:
The mistaken belief that events go together when in fact they do not.
Intuitive concept:
A type of concept that is easily acquired and used by almost all adults.
Regression to the mean:
For purely, mathematical reasons, whenever two variables are not perfectly correlated, extreme values on one variable tend to be related to values on the other variable that are closer to (i.e. regressed too) the mean of that variable.
recognition heuristic:
when choosing between two objects (according to some criterion), if one is recognized and the other is not, then select the former.
ecological rationality:
A heuristic is ecologically rational if it produces useful inferences by exploiting the structure of information in the environment.
less-is-more effect:
Sometimes the person who knows less is able to make a better judgement than the person who knows more but is unable to use that knowledge in the situation at hand.
intelligence (Binet and Simon’s 1905 definition):
A fundamental faculty, the alteration or lack of which is of the utmost importance for practical life.
factor analysis:
A statistical procedure that derives number of underlying factors that may explain the structure of a set of correlations:
general intelligence:
the part of intelligence that is common to all abilities:
crystallized intelligence:
the body of what someone has learned; may continue to increase throughout life.
fluid intelligence:
the ability to think flexibly; may increase in youth but levels off as we mature.
education (Spearman):
literally drawing out. General intelligence may be the ability to draw out the relationship that apply in a novel situation.
Raven progressive matrices:
A set of problems that constitutes the most widely accepted test if g.
working memory capacity:
the theory that working memory capacity and g are closely related.
neural plasticity:
Changes in neuronal circuitry often associated with maturation, environmental adaptation, and modulation by experience which may lead to learning and behavioral modification.
dedication intelligence:
intelligence associated with domain-specific modules that would have evolved to solve recurring problems.
improvisational intelligence:
flexible intelligence that deal with relatively unique unpredictable problems.
flynn effect:
an increase in IQ scores over historical time.
intellectual components (Sterberg) :
Elementary information processes that operate on internal representations of objects or symbols.
metacomponents (Sternberg):
Executive processes used in planning, monitoring and decision-making in task performance.
performance components:
The process that are used in the execution of a task.
Knowledge acquisition components (Sternberg):
Process concerned with learning and storing new information.
Triarchic theory of intelligence:
Sternbergs theory consisting of anylitic, practical, and creative intelligence.
Analytical intelligence:
the ability to reason using novel concepts.
Entrenched vs non-entrenched concepts:
Entrenched concepts strike us as natural and easy to reason with, whereas non-entrenched concepts strike us as unnatrural and difficult to reason with.
Practical intelligence:
the ability to find problem solutions in real-world, everyday situations.
multiple intelligences (Garner):
The hypothesis that intelligence consists not of one underlying ability but of many different abilities.
symbols systems:
different forms of representation, such as drawing, music and mathematics, that express different forms of intelligence.
U-shaped development:
the hypothesis that the development of many symbolic forms initially is delightfully pre-conventional. then descends to the merely conventional, but ultimately may achieve the integration of the post-conventional.
ur-strong:
The hypothetical first song that all children would spontaneously sing.
mid-life crisis of musicians (Bamberger):
As music students become adolescents, they may feel a tension between their increasingly explicit understanding of music and the spontaneous love of music they had as children.
10-year rule:
the hypothesis that roughly 10 years of intense practice is necessary in order to become an expert in a domain.
creativity:
the production of novel, socially valued products.
problem-finding. (Getzels):
the ability to discover new problems, their methods and solutions.
blind variation (campbell):
the generation of alternative problem solutions without foresight.
chance permutations:
Different combinations of mental elements produced according to no set rule.
alternate uses test (Barron):
a test that asks people to list uncommon uses for common objects.
associative hierchy:
the idea that associations used for problem-solving are arranged in hierarchy, and that creative people not only have more associations than most but have them arranged in flatter hierarchies: thus they are more likely than most to recognize alternative possibilities.
remote associations test ( RAT ; Mednick) :
A test that asks the participant to come up wit a single association to link three apparently unrelated words.
Blindsight:
A condition in which patients with damage to the primary visual cortex are able to make accurate judgements about objects presented to their blind area even though they report no conscious experience of the objects and believe they are only guessing.
anoetic, noetic and autonoetic:
three levels of corresponding to the procedural, semantic, and episodic memory systems.
prefrontal leucotomy:
A surgical procedure, now abandoned, in which the connections between the prefrontal lobes and other parts of the brain were severed; also known as prefrontal lobotomy.
chronesthesia:
our subjective sense of time.
non-conscious:
the level of consciousness that operates without our attention, continuously monitoring and changing the contents of thought, and tracking and changing behaviour to address goals.
conscious:
the basic level of awareness.
meta-conscious:
the level of consciousness at play when you direct your attention to your own state of mind.
encoding:
the process of transforming information into one or more forms of representation.
subliminal or unconscious perception:
perception without awareness; occurs when the stimulus is too weak to be consciously recognized but still has an impact on your behavior.
limen:
threshold.
backward masking:
presenting a stimulus, called the target, to the participant and then covering, or masking, the target with another stimulus.
direct vs indirect measures:
Participants’ reports that they have seen a stimulus, as opposed to the effects of an undetected stimulus on a subsequent task.
ecologically valid.
Generalizable to conditions in the real world.
dissociation paradigm:
an experimental strategy designed to show that it is possible to perceive stimuli in the absence of any conscious awareness of them.
Objective and subjective thresholds:
the point at which participants can detect a stimulus at a chance level versus the point at which they say they did not perceive it.
process dissociation procedure;
an experimental technique that requires participants not to respond with items they observed previously.
implicit perception:
the effect on a persons experience, thought, or action of an object in the current stimulus environment in the absence of, or independent of, conscious perception of that event.
change blindness:
the illusion that what we see in our visual field is a clear and detailed picture of the world.
retinal blurr:
the blurring of information on the retina that occurs during fast eye movements.
saccadic suppression:
the halting of visual processing during an eye mevement.
blink suppression:
the halting of visual processing during an eye blink.
Blind spot:
a region in the eye that does not contain any photoreceptors; therefore the visual systems cannot process visual stimuli that fall in that region.
perceptual completion (filling-in):
the incorrect impression that a stimulus occupies a section of the visual scene when in fact it occupies only the region around it.
meta-consciousness:
consciousness awareness of what is occurring in one’s consciousness.
mind-wandering:
the state in which your thoughts wander from a particular task without your realizing that this has occurred; also referred to as zoning out.
self-caught method:
a technique used to catch episodes of mind-wandering in which participants are asked to monitor their consciousness and report anytime their mind has wandered.
probe-caught method:
a technique to catch episodes of mind wandering by presenting participants with a probe asking them whenever they were mind wandering just before the probe was presented.
experience sampling:
the general technique of asking people to comment on the contents of their consciousness at specific moments.
temporal dissociation:
the temporary disengagement of meta-consciousness at specific moments.
rapid eye movement (rem) sleep:
the stage characterized by dreaming, increased brain activity relative to other stages of sleep and the inhibition of motor activity except in the eyes, which move rapidly back and forth.
lucid dreaming:
a dream state in which we are aware that we are dreaming.
electrrculogram (EOG):
a record of the changes in electrical potentials generated by the movements of the eye.
Electromyogram (EMG):
a record of the changes in muscle activity of the body.
easy problems of consciousness;
Understanding what types of conscious states relate to what types of neural activity:
hard problems of consciousness:
understanding why the brain gives rise to subjective experiences that have the specific qualities they have.
binocular rivalry:
when a different image is presented to each eye, the viewer becomes conscious of only one of the images at a time.
panpsychism:
The view that everything has some form of consciousness.
flash suppression:
when different images are presented to each eye and one of the images is replaced, the new image enters consciousness and the image presented to the other eye is suppressed from consciousness.
epilepsy:
the uncontrolled over-activity of neurons in the brain that can cause mental disruptions and uncontrolled muscle contractions.
theory of microconsciousness (Zeki):
the view that each individual has “many different visual consciousnesses that are disturbed over space and time”
gamma frequency:
spikes in the electrocencephalogram that occur at roughly 40 cycles per second.
visual hemispatial neglect:
lack of visual awareness of objects located in the contralesional field.
phantom limb:
the feeling, following the sudden loss of a body part, that it is still present.
body schema:
the individual’s schematic representation of his or her body.
Penfield homunculus:
a map of the sensory cortex that shows where the various parts of the body are represented; the size of each part is proportional to the area of the cortex that represents it.
