Midterm 2 Flashcards
Assimilationists
mere quantitative differences between human and animal cognition; find the differences between humans and apes minor and quantitative
Differentialists
qualitative differences between human and animal cognition; find the differences between humans and apes as one of a kind; not minor differences
types of tool-craft and tool-use in primates
termite fishing and nut cracking with rock
How much genetic material do we share with the closest living relatives?
99%
Who are our closest living relatives?
chimpanzees and bonobos
We’re really different despite the 99% overlap in genetics to chimps and bonobos because we have culture and language and they don’t; the way we operate in life is fundamentally different
differentialist viewpoint
We are similar to chimpanzees and bonobos by sharing 99% overlap in genetics and our problem solving capacities, instrumental reasoning, and intellect
assimilationist viewpoint
notion of “insight”
seeing a problem’s solution
two components of insight
intuitive; believed apes knew the solution to a problem without having to undergo trial and error
What other animals outside of primates use tools?
crows
Neo-Caledonian crow
can use tools and form hooks to get food
what children/apes had to do in the peanut task
long narrow tube with a peanut in the bottom; had to know to pour the water into the tube to make the peanut rise to the top; apes outperformed the children (under age 6); children do not use water as a tool until at least age 8
insight is limited by this
the visual field
drawing causal inferences in apes
presented the ape with two opaque cups: in one cup is something to be retrieved (baited) and one cup is empty; shake both cups in front of the ape: one would not make a sound, while the other would; apes would reach for the cup that makes the sound; apes can infer from the sound that there is something in the cup that produces the sound; if the same experiment is presented but only one cup is shaken, the one that does not have anything it in, the ape would still infer to reach for the other cup because they know there is nothing in the cup that was shaken
experiment that showed chimps are not bound to the immediate visual field for problem solving but that they actually have foresight; they can think ahead
opening an apparatus with a specific tool on the first day, tool disappears the second day so they are unable to open the apparatus, on the third day the tool is there again so the ape takes the tool with them so that it will be available the next day no matter what
food caching in Western Scrub Jays
will hide their food for future use; successfully uncover caches 250 days or more after caching food; shows that they have episodic memory because they can remember exactly where they hid it and how
episodic memory
recalling an event/experience
semantic knowledge
recalling something factual (not necessarily remembering the experience but that it happened)
social cognition
cognitive process that have to do with other people and understanding their minds/cognition
sclera of humans vs. that of other primates
human’s scleras are white while those of other primates are not; allows humans to make eye contact and follow eye gaze more easily, encourages cooperation
object choice task
two cups, one with food in it (baited) the other without anything in it; the experimenter points to the baited cup; a human child understands that the experimenter is telling them the food is in that cup through the pointing, whereas apes do not understand what the pointing means; but when the experimenter reaches for the cup instead of pointing to it, the ape will immediately know that is the baited cup (apes are competitive animals)
simple visual perspective taking skills that other animals have
chimpanzees can understand what others can or cannot see; lower-ranking chimps will take food when the higher-ranking chimps are not looking; ability to take others’ perspectives
ape cognition vs. homo cognition
apes: know how to manipulate their environment to favor themselves; competitive in their actions; causal thinking; all that they do is for individual action
humans: know how to communicate with each other, especially to solve problems; more socially informed than the other primates
preschool age
2-6 years
Are the growth rates of the body and brain faster or slower in early childhood over infancy?
slower
Is motor drive stronger or less developed in early childhood over infancy?
stronger; ability to use and control their bodies grows by leaps and bounds
motor drive
the pleasure young children take in using their new motor skills
early childhood sleep
need 12-15 hours
most 2-5 years old receive this amount of sleep
below 9.5 hours; sleep deprivation; especially prominent in low-income families
weaning off breastfeeding
infants are generally fully weaned by 2 years old in industrialized countries; less developed countries will breastfeed children until 4 years old as long as they are still producing milk)
obesity in early childhood
if a child is obese between 2 and 4 years old, they are five times more likely to be obese later
percentage of US households that are food-insecure
14-15%
percentage of US households that are food-insecure with hunger
5-6%
percentage of the adult weight of the brain present in the beginning of early childhood
80%
notable changes in brain during early childhood is due to…
increased length and branching of neurons, myelination, synaptic pruning
Piaget’s stage for early childhood
preoperational stage (2-6 years)
preoperational stage (2-6 years)
children are unable to decenter their thinking or to think through the consequences of their actions; precausal thinking; not logical; inherent egocentrism; thinking is infused with error and confusion; mythical and circular reasoning; centration; confuse cause and effect
three manifestations of the thinking in preoperational stage
animism, mythical thinking; confuse cause and effect; confusion of appearance and reality (thinking reality is appearance)
centration
focus on one dimension or feature to the exclusion of all other dimensions or features
realism error
believing things appear the way they are
phenomenism error
things are the way they look
mental operation
mental process by which information is combined, separated, sorted, and transformed in a logical fashion
the inhibition problem
difficulty with inhibition/inhibitory control; cannot stop themselves from doing things
marshmallow task
sat a child down at a table with a plate with one marshmallow on it; tell the child they can either eat the marshmallow now or wait until the experimenter comes back to have two marshmallows; children who were able to resist the temptation and wait for the second marshmallow did better in school, had a lower rate of divorce, lower use of substances, etc.
experiment with the closed box
child was presented with a closed box and the experimenter tells them they cannot look in the box while they are gone; almost everyone looks but hardly admits to it; when asked if they can predict what’s in the box even through they said they didn’t look it in, they will say what they saw
abstraction makes it easier for children to delay gratification
experiment where the child was presented with two images and was told that if they want the content of one image, to point at the other (less is more); one image with a large amount of candy and another image with one piece of candy; hard for the child to understand to point to the image with one piece of candy to get the large amount of candy; Task became easier with abstraction (using images of things that are not pleasurable like candy i.e. marbles)
scale errors
children treating miniature objects as normal-sized ones; rare
Heider and Simmel
shows participants a video of moving geometric objects and were told to narrate; participants used agency terminology like mental states; understood the objects’ actions like humans