Learning and Knowledge

Question 1

what type of information catches our attention which we cannot help?

Answer 1

salience

Question 2

T or F, selective attention determines the mental reps that we form about the world

Answer 2

True

Question 3

how is selective attention necessary to goal pursuit?

Answer 3

to pursue a goal, organisms must overcome initial fascination (attention) to salient but irrelevant attributes

Question 4

what shows us that attention is important for learning?

Answer 4

• trade offs between salience and validity
• blocking
• highlighting
• learning rules of different complexity

Question 5

what is salience?

Answer 5

the measure of to what degree something catches our attention

Question 6

what study demonstrated how attention is driven by both salience and validity?

Answer 6

varying the validity of the high salience arrow and assessing people’s utilisation of the arrow.

Question 7

what is simple learning?

Answer 7

learning through association build up gradually over time

Question 8

what is attentional learning?

Answer 8

selective attention allows for some aspects of an event to be more strongly associated than others

Question 9

what is one shot/fast mapping ?

Answer 9

learning by exclusion based on what is already known (learning takes place by proving/disproving the expectations/hypotheses we bring)

Question 10

what is the basis of simple learning theory?

Answer 10

co occurrences of cues and outcomes lead to a strengthening between these two elements

Question 11

how does attentional learning differ from simple learning theory?

Answer 11

it differs as it also incorporates the ability to to differentially weight cues according to their relevance.

Question 12

in one shot generalisation, expectations provide hypotheses which we use to…?

Answer 12

• explain the thing we’re trying to learn

- evaluate our experiences (which allow us to update our expectations)

Question 13

what is learning through one shot generalisation/fast mapping?

Answer 13

learning by exclusion, based on what is already known (our expectations)

Question 14

what are two ways in which prior knowledge influences our hypotheses?

Answer 14

Holmesian deduction

Judicial exoneration

Question 15

what is Holmesian deduction

Answer 15

once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains however improbable must be the truth
only hypotheses which explain data are plausible candidates for an explanation

Question 16

what is Judicial exoneration

Answer 16

of one suspect confesses, then we let the other suspect go… if one hypothesis explains the data, the other candidates are considered less likely

Question 17

how does learning depend on prior knowledge?

Answer 17

a set of hypotheses make predictions for the types of observations that you are likely to observe and then upon observation of these events, those hypotheses are strengthened and others are rejected

Question 18

what is Bayes’s rule?

Answer 18

your updated belief should be proportional to your prior belief times the likelihood of the observed event (how much did hypothesis actually predict the event?)

Question 19

what is occam’s razor?

Answer 19

people prefer explanations that explain more data with a minimal number of assumptions, and that the simplest explanation that fits the data is probably the correct one

Question 20

T or F, explanations are hypotheses?

Answer 20

True