Lecture 2 Themes Flashcards
What is the “Garcia Effect” ?
An experiment by Garcia and Koelling where rats drank sweet water in a loud room with flashing lights, group 1 rats had nausea due to X-rays, and group 2 feet hurt due to electric shock. rats avoided either the sweet or environment depending on what group the rats were in. Rats solved the problem of ambiguity of what caused their discomfort by adding assumptions about how the world worked. Stomach illness: taste, not environment, & Physical pain: environment not taste.
Conclusion: Assumptions are often, but not always correct.
What is Induction?
Much of cognition is induction (ambiguous solutions) meaning that we begin with specific facts or observations and then draw general conclusion from them. Induction is semantic (finding meanings)
Ex. I have seen two cats and they were brown… mishi is brown therefore mishi is a cat.
What is Deduction?
Deduction begins with a general statement and try to figure out specific claims that follow from it.
Deduction is syntactic.
Ex. All whales are fish. willy is a whale so willy is a fish
All gorillas are apes……
All apes are mammals…
so… All gorillas are mammals…
this is an example of…?
Deductive arguments
Gorillas like eating onions
So chimpanzees like eating onions.
Inductive argument
99 swans have been observed and all of them were white therefore all swans are white
Inductive argument
Cognitive psychology classes are fun This class is a cognitive psychology class this class is fun
Deductive argument
Human cognition is
a) Inductive
b) deductive
A) Inductive
Induction is prevalent in science and human life.
Children’s word learning is assisted by what three assumptions?
Children learn the unique meaning of words because they bring into the world-learning problems several assumptions.
- Taxonomic
- Mutual exclusivity
- Whole object
What is the Taxonomic assumption ?
Same “kind” of object, not same “theme”
Children will extend a new label to something of the same kind rather than to something which is thematically related to the known object.
Ex: See this spider? (visuals)
can u find another spider a) cricket or b) spider web
children would choose the cricket.
What is Mutual Exclusivity Assumption ?
words have mutually exclusive meanings .
Ex: When given the option between an apple and a unknown object and asked which object is an “mafer” Children will choose the unknown object because Things that have a name dont get another and apple already has a name.
What is the Whole object assumption?
words refer to an object rather than its parts or features
Ex: A novel label is associated with the entire object rather than a part of that object.
What are heuristics?
They are simple efficient rules that are learned or hard-encoded by evolutionary processes.
Ex. Over time you have learned to come to a complete stop in a stop sign or else get ticketed. Now whenever you come to a stop sign, you have to give very little thought at all to what behavior is required. You have a heuristic for stop signs.
What are the two examples that prove that visual perception is assisted by prior assumptions?
Using heuristics in vision
1) When its common sense that there is a single light source that comes from above us either sun or light bulb, when we are presented with an image with lighter at the top and darker at the bottom, we conclude that its a bump, and vise versa.
2) We eventually realize that gravity pull objects directly down, so when an object is dropped, we expect theyll fall along a straight trajectory to a lower place. video showed in class displays kids difficulty understanding how the objects followed through the tube which prevented them from falling straight downward.
What can we conclude about assumptions?
Much of cognition is induction. To solve the ambiguity we must add assumptions(use heuristics)
also w/out assumptions… world learning, vision, and rats’ selective association would not be possible.
and last, the assumption may be innate or acquired (heuristics)
