Midterm 2 (NEW PROGRESS)

Question 1

What are examples of typicality effects?

Answer 1

• We name typical category members before atypical ones
• We are faster to put typical members into categories than atypical ones
• Typical exemplars show larger priming effects than atypical ones
• Infants learn typical category members first
• When producing sentences, we list typical category members before atypical ones

Question 2

Describe the exemplar theory of categorization

Answer 2

• Rather than storing an abstract prototype in memory to which items can be compared, exemplar theory proposes that we store actual examples of items we have encountered in the past
• Ex: your knowledge of the bird category contains a set of birds that you have seen before
• Categorization occurs by comparing new items to the ones you have in memory and looking for similarity between their features
• If a new item has many similar features with the category members you have in memory and not a lot of features in common with members of other categories, it is placed into the first category

Question 3

How does the exemplar theory of categorization explain the typicality effects?

Answer 3

• This theory can explain typicality effects because typical items are similar to many other category members so it will be easy (and fast) to retrieve those members from memory
• Atypical members will be harder to retrieve because they are less common
• Ex: on the one hand, an apple is similar to other fruits but dissimilar to vegetables, so it is considered a typical fruit. This means it will be processed quickly because we can think of many other similar fruits. On the other hand, a squash is similar to some fruits, but also similar to some vegetables. This makes it an atypical member of the fruit category and more difficult to identify as a fruit because there are fewer similar examples

Question 4

How does exemplar theory explain context effects?

Answer 4

• Because it assumes that categorization depends on personal experience
• Ex: a robin is a typical bird in North America because it is similar to many birds that one would encounter there. Similarly, a rainbow lorikeet is a typical bird in Australia because is it similar to many birds that are seen there

Question 5

Describe Dopkins and Gleason’s (1997) study on the exemplar theory before they introduced the ambiguous exemplars

Answer 5

• They had participants learn to categorize rectangles on a computer screen into 2 different categories
• Participants were not given any rules to help them learn how to sort the rectangles, they were simply told whether they had classified each rectangle correctly
• What participants didn’t know was that the rectangles could be categorized by considering both their length and the position they appeared on the screen -> one type of rectangle was usually wide and near the top of the screen (category 1); the other type of rectangle was narrow and near the bottom of the screen (category 2)
• After many trials, participants were able to accurately categorize the rectangles
• This finding was expected because it has been known for a long time that we are very good at categorization even when we aren’t told how to do it

Question 6

Describe Dopkins and Gleason’s (1997) study on the exemplar theory when they introduced the ambiguous exemplars

Answer 6

• Participants then had to categorize new, ambiguous exemplars which could theoretically belong to either category (they were medium length in the middle of the screen) and were designed in such a way that prototype theory and exemplar theory made different predictions about how they would be categorized
• The new rectangles were similar to the average, or prototypical, rectangle from category 2, but they were more similar to some of the previously seen individual exemplars from the category 1, meaning that the prototype approach would predict that participants would categorize the new rectangles into category 2, whereas, the exemplar theory would predict that participants would categorize the new rectangles into category 1
• The results showed that participants tended to categorize the new rectangles into the wide and high group (category 1) most often
• They based their categorization on similarity to previously seen exemplars rather than similarity to a prototype

Question 7

What do the prototype theory and exemplar theory fail to account for?

Answer 7

• Both theories claim that the fact that people provide consistent typicality ratings to items indicates that category boundaries are fuzzy and not rule-based. However, Armstrong, Gleitman, and Gleitman (1983) showed that participants could give consistent typicality ratings to well-defined categories, indicating that perhaps the typicality ratings of other categories, such as birds and fruit, were merely an artifact of the experimental method used and not indicative of fuzzy category borders
• According to these views, we categorize items by comparing the similarity between a new item and either a prototype or many exemplars in memory. However, they don’t specify how we decide which features to compare. This concept of implicit ideas about category membership is not explained by either prototype or exemplar theory, but is addressed by knowledge-based views of categorization

Question 8

Describe Armstrong, Gleitman, and Gleitman (1983) study on typicality ratings

Answer 8

• They had participants give typicality ratings to naturally occurring categories, such as birds and fruit, but also to categories that have well-defined category membership rules (ex: odd numbers)
• They found that their participants agreed with the idea that numbers are either odd or even and that there really isn’t such a thing as a “more odd” number, (i.e., they conform to rules). However, they still gave odd numbers typicality ratings when asked to do so and participants’ typicality ratings were consistent with each other
  Ex: participants agreed that 3 is a more typical odd number than is 447
• Conclusion: If participants could give consistent typicality ratings to well-defined categories, perhaps the typicality ratings of other categories, such as birds and fruit, were merely an artifact of the experimental method used and not indicative of fuzzy category borders

Question 9

What did Murphy and Medin (1985) point out about categorization?

Answer 9

• That there’s potentially an infinite number of ways that any 2 items could be similar
• Ex: A banana and a television can both be purchased in a store, both are enjoyed by people, both are smaller than a truck, neither of them is purple
• We appear to have an understanding of which features are important for category membership and which are not
• This concept of implicit ideas about category membership is not explained by either prototype or exemplar theory, but is addressed by knowledge-based views of categorization

Question 10

Describe knowledge-based views of categorization

Answer 10

• This approach assumes we use more than feature similarity to categorize
• Instead, they propose that we rely on our broad knowledge base to explain the reasons for category membership
• Often our ideas about category membership are implicit
• Ex: we know a poodle is a dog because there’s just something “doggy” about it. Even a poodle with three legs that can’t bark is still a dog because it hasn’t lost its “dogginess”
  -This type of theory avoids the problem faced by prototype and exemplar theories of explaining which features are important for determining category membership and which are not
• According to theory-based approaches, membership isn’t based on features; instead, we use broad theories about essentialism

Question 11

What did Medin (1989) refer to as psychological essentialism?

Answer 11

• He described this idea that we have implicit theories about the requirements for category membership
• The idea is that all category members possess a fundamental essence that is unique to that category and determines membership
• Ex: Dogs are “doggy,” birds are “birdy,” and fruits are “fruity”

Question 12

What’s psychological essentialism?

Answer 12

The proposal that categories have a natural underlying true nature that can’t be stated explicitly

Question 13

What did Murphy and Allopena discover with regards to descriptions of place whose features do and don’t go together?

Answer 13

• They found that participants can learn about the building whose features go together more easily than the second type of building whose features don’t seem to go together
• These results indicate that when we learn about categories, we try to make meaningful connections from our past knowledge to explain the particular combination of features
• According to this view, we rely on categories to teach us about the world, and we use our knowledge about the world to help explain category membership

Question 14

What’s a consequence of categorization based on psychological essentialism?

Answer 14

• Risk of applying “essential” qualities to social categories in the same way that we do to biological categories
• While it may be reasonable to think all dogs have an essential “doggy” quality, it doesn’t make sense to make the same claims about older adults
• While it’s natural to expect that we put people into categories in the same way that we categorize objects since our brains are designed to categorize the world to help us make sense of it, it’s important to keep in mind that categorizing people that way leads to stereotyping
• There’s a relationship between essentialism and stereotypes

Question 15

Describe Bastian and Haslam (2006) study on participants’ essentialist beliefs

Answer 15

• They asked participants to complete questionnaires that measured their essentialist beliefs
• The questionnaires measured how much participants believed that people belong to discrete groups (“Everyone is either a certain type of person or they are not”), whether or not qualities are changeable (“Everyone, no matter who they are, can significantly change their basic characteristics”) and whether group membership has a biological cause (“The kind of person someone is can be largely attributed to their genetic inheritance”)
• The results revealed that participants with higher essentialist beliefs were more likely to endorse a variety of stereotypes about different groups of people

Question 16

Why is it important to not apply essentialism views on people?

Answer 16

• This leads to stereotyping
• While we all categorize people based on our past experiences and knowledge, it’s important to remember that the categories we form about people are shortcuts meant to reduce cognitive load, and not based on essential characteristics of group members

Question 17

Research about what has been particularly influential in informing psychologists’ understanding of knowledge organization?

Answer 17

Research about human memory and artificial intelligence

Question 18

What’s a core idea about categories that was first introduced by Rosch et al (1976)?

Answer 18

• He noticed that individual items can belong to multiple levels or hierarchies of categories
• Rosch further suggested that basic level categories are the most cognitively efficient

Question 19

What are the 3 levels of categories that Rosch named for his idea of the hierarchy of categories?

Answer 19

• Basic level category
• Subordinate category
• Superordinate category

Question 20

Describe the basic level category

Answer 20

• The level of categorization that people find most natural
• It’s the most cognitively efficient level that is both informative and distinctive
• Level in the hierarchy that seems to most of us to be “just right” -> they provide just the right amount of information about the category to provide useful information (informative), and can be used to distinguish members from members of other categories (distinctive)
• This is the level we typically use to name the category of an item, and it’s also the one that children learn first as they learn to name objects around them

Question 21

Describe the subordinate category level

Answer 21

• The category level that is below the basic level
• This level is more informative than the basic level but less distinctive
• Informative because they provide a lot of information about the item; however, they are not distinctive because they share many features in common

Question 22

Describe the superordinate category level

Answer 22

• The category level that is above the basic level
• This level is less informative than the basic level but distinctive
• Ex: animals are quite different from fruits, but knowing something is an animal provides relatively little information compared to knowing that it’s a dog

Question 23

Rank the different category levels from most broad to most specific

Answer 23

1. Superordinate level
2. Basic level
3. Subordinate level

Question 24

How can the human mind can be likened to a computer?

Answer 24

Humans are information processors that receive sensory input, use rule-based strategies to manipulate information, and produce a behavioral output, much in the same way as a computer

Question 25

Where must knowledge be represented and stored?

Answer 25

Knowledge must be represented and stored within an information processing system (either a human or computer)

Question 26

Why did both early cognitive psychologists and computer scientists develop theories of knowledge organization?

Answer 26

• Because knowledge representation was thought to be essential for information processing
• Many of the early theories of knowledge organization in humans were developed to explain how a computer might be programmed to store information

Question 27

What became one of the most influential in shaping the way cognitive psychologists think about semantic knowledge?

Answer 27

A model for how to store semantic information in computer memory and train a computer to understand printed text

Question 28

Describe Collins and Quillian (1969) hierarchical semantic network model

Answer 28

• They suggested that knowledge is stored as concepts within individual units called “nodes”
• These nodes point to properties of those concepts as well as to other nodes so that knowledge is represented in a network of interconnected nodes
• Ex: the concept “CANARY” is stored in a node that has pointers to the properties “CAN SING” and “IS YELLOW” “CANARY” is also connected to the “BIRD” node because a canary is a type of bird
• They believed semantic networks are organized hierarchically with superordinate categories occupying the uppermost level of the network and subordinate categories occupying lower levels
• Because computers (and presumably humans) have limited memory storage, this model demonstrates cognitive economy by only storing a property once at the highest level in the hierarchy
• Semantic networks demonstrate property inheritance as subordinate categories inherit the properties of the superordinate categories they are connected to
• Activation spreads between concepts by pathways connecting them

Question 29

What’s cognitive economy?

Answer 29

The tendency to conserve cognitive effort and resources

Question 30

What’s property inheritance?

Answer 30

A characteristic of semantic network models in which nodes inherit the properties of the nodes higher in the hierarchy to which they are connected

Question 31

How does activation of the hierarchical semantic network model happen?

Answer 31

• A node becomes active as a result of input from the environment
• Ex: from reading the word canary or seeing a picture of a canary in a book
• This activation then spreads from the “CANARY” node to the other nodes that it’s connected to
• An implication of this spreading activation within such a hierarchical model is that nodes that are farther away from each other in the hierarchy will take longer to activate

Question 32

How did Collins and Quillian test their hierarchical semantic network model in humans?

Answer 32

• By using a sentence verification task
• In this task, participants are presented with sentences, such as “A canary is a bird” and asked to press one button if it is a true statement and another button if it is a false statement
• The results of their experiment confirmed their model
• Participants responded fastest to sentences that could be answered by searching between the fewest levels in the hierarchy (e.g., “A canary is a canary”) and slowest to sentences that required searching through multiple levels in the hierarchy (e.g., “A canary is an animal”)

Question 33

What’s a sentence verification task?

Answer 33

An experimental task in which participants have to judge whether a sentence is true or false as fast as possible

Question 34

What problems did other researchers who began testing theories about the organization of semantic memory find with the hierarchical model of semantic knowledge?

Answer 34

• A hierarchical model of semantic knowledge failed to account for typicality effects
• Using a sentence verification task, Rips, Shoben and Smith (1973) demonstrated that participants were faster to respond to “a dog is an animal” than “a dog is a mammal”
• A hierarchical model predicts the opposite results because a search has to travel through more levels in the hierarchy between “DOG” and “ANIMAL” than between “DOG” and “MAMMAL.”
• They also found that participants were faster to respond to “a robin is a bird” than “a chicken is a bird.”

Question 35

Describe Collins and Loftus (1975) spreading activation model

Answer 35

• A semantic network model in which concepts are organized based on their semantic similarity to each other
• Accounts for typicality effects
• They used the idea of semantic priming to propose a model in which nodes are connected to each other via semantic relatedness instead of using a hierarchical structure
• There’s no hierarchy in the spreading activation model. Instead, concepts are organized by their semantic similarity. The more similar the concepts, the more connections between them and the shorter the distance between them
• Ex: “FIRE ENGINE” is closely related to “TRUCK” and “BUS” but not semantically similar to “FLOWERS”
• This model proposes that when one node becomes active as a result of a stimulus in the environment, activation spreads to all connected nodes -> the farther this activation has to travel, the longer it takes and the weaker it becomes
• Ex: activation spreads quickly and strongly from “FIRE ENGINE” to “TRUCK” but is unlikely to reach “ROSES” because activation will have faded by the time it travels that far in the network
• This idea of spreading activation has been very influential in psychologists’ understanding of semantic knowledge structure

Question 36

What were Meyer and Schvaneveldt (1971) the first to do?

Answer 36

• They were the first to use a lexical decision task to demonstrate semantic priming between two related words
• That is, they found that participants were faster to respond to the word butter if it was presented with the word bread compared to if it was presented with the word nurse

Question 37

How does Collins and Loftus (1975) spreading activation model explain typicality effects?

Answer 37

• This model can explain typicality effects because typical exemplars are semantically similar to each other and, therefore, activation will spread quickly between them
• Atypical exemplars are farther apart from other category members because they are less semantically similar to other category members, so activation will take longer to travel between those concepts

Question 38

What’s a schema?

Answer 38

• A cognitive structure that’s an organized knowledge base about a particular topic
• It includes everything we know about a particular thing, event, person, or situation
• The concept of a schema is broad and may seem vague, but that is because the knowledge within a schema is broad and not necessarily well defined
• Ex: Schema about university includes everything you know about what a university looks like, what you do there, and what people you would find there

Question 39

What idea did Sir Francis C. Bartlett introduce?

Answer 39

• The idea that knowledge is organized in schemata (schemas)
• He was primarily interested in applied psychology (he was one of the first and most influential psychologists to bring experimental psychology out of the laboratory)
• He wanted to know about the things that affected people’s abilities to remember meaningful, everyday information
• Rather than having participants remember lists of unrelated words or strings of letters, Bartlett wanted to know how people could remember stories and pictures
• He proposed that what we remember is influenced by our past experiences and knowledge

Question 40

In order to investigate schemata and the role of knowledge on memory, Bartlett devised what method?

Answer 40

The method of repeated reproduction

Question 41

Describe Bartlett’s method of repeated reproduction

Answer 41

• An experimental technique in which participants must reproduce an item repeatedly from memory
• In this method, participants are shown a stimulus, then asked to reproduce it from memory
• After a delay, participants are asked to reproduce it again from memory, and again, and again, etc.
• Participants are only shown the original stimulus once
• Each reproduction has to be based on memory
• The reproductions become less similar to the original stimulus with each attempt and begin to look more and more like a familiar object
• Over time, details are lost from memory but we can use the information from our schemata to help guide memory retrieval
• Bartlett’s participants did not have past knowledge related to the original stimulus, but they did have schematic knowledge about a face so they used that knowledge to create the best reproduction they could

Question 42

What did Bartlett’s method of repeated reproduction help him conclude about memory

Answer 42

• Bartlett demonstrated that memory is reconstructive
• Instead of retrieving an exact copy of an event from memory, we rely on our past knowledge and experience to help us reconstruct memory the best we can
• If we don’t have a memory for a specific item, we can use our schematic knowledge to fill-in-the-blanks

Question 43

What’s implied by the schema theory of knowledge organization and people and their schemas?

Answer 43

• That people with similar experiences will have similar schemata
• In this way, we can talk about shared cultural knowledge and use it to make inferences and predict behavior

Question 44

Describe Bernsten and Rubin (2004) study on undergraduate students’ schemas about a baby’s imagined life or life scripts

Answer 44

• They asked undergraduate students to imagine a newborn baby and make predictions about what would happen in that baby’s life as they got older
• There was a large amount of overlap across the life events listed by participants, including “start school,” “go to college,” “fall in love,” “get married,” and “have children”
• This showed that part of our knowledge includes expectations about what is expected in a typical life-course within a culture

Question 45

What do all of the theories based on a “classic” view of cognitive psychology and the computer metaphor of the mind assume about knowledge?

Answer 45

That knowledge must be represented somehow in the mind as symbols that can be manipulated

Question 46

What’s a problem faced by any information processor that uses symbols to represent knowledge?

Answer 46

The symbol grounding problem

Question 47

What’s the symbol grounding problem?

Answer 47

• Problem first described by Stevan Harnad
• Relates to how symbols get their meaning in the real world
• The problem is that any symbol system can only replace one symbol with another one, and this process could continue infinitely
• Symbols need to be grounded -> there needs to be some way to connect this symbolic representation to the real world
• Humans aren’t troubled by this problem because we can interact with the environment to ground our symbols
• Ex: we know what an apple is because we can use our bodies to see it, touch it, and taste it

Question 48

What’s one way that artificial intelligence has addressed the symbol-grounding problem?

Answer 48

• With robotics
• A computer that can receive sensory input from the environment and manipulate objects can address the symbol grounding problem by getting direct access to the environment
  Ex: The robot iCub

Question 49

What has allowed important advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence?

Answer 49

Artificial neural networks (ANNs; also called connectionist models)

Question 50

Who aided the creation of artificial neural networks and what is the goal of ANNs?

Answer 50

• The creation of ANNs was made possible by computer scientists working to understand how knowledge might be represented in a symbol system, such as a computer or human
• Although, at first glance, connectionist models may seem like a type of semantic network model, their fundamental assumptions are very different from each other

Question 51

What’s the difference between cognitive psychology and connectionism?

Answer 51

Cognitive psychology was based on a computer metaphor of the mind, but connectionism is based on how neurons in the brain are connected

Question 52

Describe the structure and function of ANNs

Answer 52

• ANNs are composed of nodes in input, output, and hidden layers (much like the human cortex is composed of layers) that are connected to each other by weighted connections
• Unlike semantic network models, ANNs don’t store knowledge explicitly in nodes. Instead, knowledge is contained in the distribution of weights between the connected nodes. These weights determine which pattern from the inputs (such as an image) will ultimately produce the specific outputs (such as a verbal label)
• Once the network has been successfully trained (by tuning the weights), the “knowledge” is embedded in the behavior of the network, specifically, its ability to respond with the correct output to a given input
• Knowledge is stored as a pattern of activation of the nodes across the entire system
• Different information is stored as different patterns of activation

Question 53

What happens when a computer is trying to learn whether something belongs to a certain category or not?

Answer 53

• According to the processing of many features of an image, it’ll determine whether something does or doesn’t belong to a category
• Each time the computer guesses correctly, its connections become stronger
• Each time the computer guesses wrong, its connections become weaker
• Through this process, the computer will teach itself to learn what elements of an image correspond to members of a certain category and become quicker and more efficient at identifying them as such

Question 54

What are some of the benefits of neural network models for human cognition and artificial intelligence?

Answer 54

• For psychologists, because the networks are modeled after the brain, they can explain some phenomena that more traditional cognitive models can’t do as easily
• Because knowledge is stored as a pattern of activity across a large number of units, connectionist networks can withstand some loss of units with limited negative effects -> graceful degradation

Question 55

What’s graceful degradation?

Answer 55

• A property of networks in which damage to part of the network results in relatively few deficits because information is distributed across the network and no single node contains information
• A network (or brain) doesn’t lose all function as a result of restricted damage, although some limited deficits do occur
• Ex: patients with brain damage as a result of herpes simplex virus encephalitis often display category-specific deficits of semantic knowledge
• Commonly observed with damage to the human brain

Question 56

What are category-specific deficits of semantic knowledge?

Answer 56

• A specific loss of semantic knowledge from one category but not another as a result of brain damage
• One of the most common category-specific deficits is one in which a patient loses knowledge of living things but retains knowledge of non-living things
• This pattern of deficits can be explained if we think of knowledge as a distributed pattern of activity across cells -> similar items likely result in similar patterns of activation in the brain. As some cells are damaged, the pattern of activation changes in the network, but not all knowledge is lost because there are still many functioning cells
• Because one living thing is more similar to another living thing than it is to a non-living thing, it’s likely that the damaged cells affect items within a category but spare items that belong to a different category

Question 57

Describe the research by Lambon Ralph, Lowe, and Rogers (2007) on category-specific deficits of semantic knowledge

Answer 57

• The research used an ANN to simulate the pattern of deficits of a group of brain-damaged patients with a living-thing category-specific deficit
• They did this by altering the connection weights to mimic brain damage in an ANN that had previously been trained to recognize pictures of living and non-living things
• This ANN that previously could distinguish living from non-living things, developed a living-things deficit after the artificial “damage.”
• That is, a neural network model that previously was able to name a picture of a fox was no longer able to do so, but could still name a picture of a car
• This supports the idea that human knowledge may be stored as a distributed pattern of activity across neurons, and that connectionist models are a good way to approach knowledge representation in computers

Question 58

Describe the so-called “black box” problem of neural network models

Answer 58

• Neural networks are notoriously difficult to explain or interpret once they have been trained
• While we can observe the responses of a neural network to a specific input, it’s very difficult to determine why it made the response that it did because the information is represented in the values of distributed weights, not meaningful semantic units
• You might think of this as a modern equivalent to the criticisms of behaviorism: input and output can be observed, but there is no explanation about what is happening in between
• This means that neural networks can end up reproducing the same theoretical challenges as the brains they were meant to replicate

Question 59

Describe embodied cognition theories (aka grounded cognition)

Answer 59

• They try to capture this grounding of symbols by considering the interaction between the brain, body, and environment in shaping thought
• ## In its weakest form, researchers suggest the body influences cognition

Question 60

Describe Katinka Dijkstra and her colleagues (2007) study on autobiographical memory retrieval and body position

Answer 60

• They demonstrated that autobiographical memory retrieval can be improved by matching body position at retrieval to body position at encoding (an extension of the encoding specificity principle)
• They asked their participants to describe memories of events that are associated with predictable body positions, such as going to the dentist or waving goodbye
• Participants’ recall accuracy was higher when their body positions during recall matched the typical body position of the event
• Ex: participants more accurately recalled their last visit to the dentist while reclining in a chair compared to when they were standing up

Question 61

Describe the findings of Williams & Bargh (2008) study on the interaction between the body and thought

Answer 61

They found that participants are more likely to rate descriptions of people as “warm” after holding a hot cup of coffee compared to holding a cup of iced coffee

Question 62

Describe Barsalou’s (2008) idea of how the body has a causal role in thought

Answer 62

• He proposed an embodied theory in which cognition is grounded in sensory experiences, and that these sensorimotor experiences are used to understand abstract cognitive processes
• According to this view, knowledge uses similar sensorimotor neurons as perception and action
• Ex: our knowledge of an apple relies on a distributed network of the modality-specific neurons that are used for visual, tactile and taste perception of the apple
• In this way, embodied cognition is similar to connectionism
• Knowledge isn’t stored as a single representation of a concept, instead, it is held as a distributed pattern of activity across many neurons

Question 63

Describe Schnall, Zadra, and Proffitt (2010) findings for their study on the connection between action and thought

Answer 63

In one experiment they demonstrated that participants judged the incline of a hill to be steeper if they had low energy (reduced blood glucose) compared to participants who did not have low energy

Question 64

Describe the influential experiment by Hauk, Johnsrude and Pulvermüller (2004) that provided support for the idea of distributed, modality-specific knowledge representation

Answer 64

• Using fMRI, they first observed brain activity in a group of participants while they were moving their tongues, their fingers and their feet
• Due to the topographical structure of the motor cortex, motor actions elicited a predictable pattern of brain activity in motor areas of the brain
• Later, they asked participants to silently read words that are associated with actions by the tongue (lick), finger (pick), and foot (kick)
• They found that doing actions and silently reading action words activated similar motor areas of the brain - Participants weren’t performing any actions while silently reading, yet motor areas were still active when reading the action words
• This finding lends support to the claim that knowledge is stored as modality-specific neural activity

Question 65

How is the motor cortex organized in the brain?

Answer 65

The motor cortex is topographically organized such that adjacent body parts are controlled by adjacent areas of the brain

Question 66

What’s a major difference between embodied theories of knowledge and classic symbolic cognitive theories?

Answer 66

• That according to embodied theories, knowledge is goal-driven, flexible, and context-dependent
• Classic theories, such as the prototype theory and semantic network models consider knowledge to be abstract and independent of context
• According to such symbolic cognitive theories, all our knowledge about “BIRDS,” for example, is stored together and accessed when we think about birds
• An embodied view suggests that the information we retrieve from semantic memory depends on the context we are in at the moment, such that we more easily access knowledge that is relevant to the current context
• It suggests that the knowledge you access about birds will be quite different when sitting on the beach compared to sitting down for Thanksgiving dinner

Question 67

Describe Zwaan, Stanfield, and Yaxley (2002) study that provided evidence that knowledge access depends on context

Answer 67

• They had participants read simple sentences about objects (e.g., “The chef saw the egg in the refrigerator”) and then showed them a picture of an object
• Participants’ task was to press one button if the picture had been mentioned in the sentence, and press another button if the picture had not been mentioned in the sentence
• The important manipulation was that 1/2 of the trials, the picture matched the shape of the object implied by the sentence (e.g., a whole egg), and in the other half of the trials, the picture didn’t match the shape implied by the sentence (e.g., a broken egg)
• Participants were faster to respond “yes” if the picture matched the shape that was implied by the sentence
• Ex: they were faster to respond if shown a whole egg rather than a broken egg because an egg is usually found whole in the fridge, not broken
• These results contradict a traditional symbolic cognitive explanation of semantic knowledge because if all knowledge of an item is stored together in a node or category, it shouldn’t matter what shape the object is
• An egg is still an egg if it’s broken, so participants should be able to recognize an egg just as easily regardless of the context
• Instead, it seems as though the sentence acted to make participants think about an egg in the way they would see it in that context -> participants’ knowledge about eggs was context-dependent

Question 68

Describe Elizabeth Warrington’s (1975) findings on patients who displayed a loss of semantic memory

Answer 68

• These patients were unable to name objects in pictures or describe the characteristics of those objects, but they had normal intelligence, perception, and language abilities
• Today, these patients would be diagnosed with semantic dementia

Question 69

What’s semantic dementia?

Answer 69

• A type of dementia characterized by a progressive loss of semantic memory leading to deficits in naming ability, comprehension in language, and object use
• Semantic dementia is a progressive neurodegenerative disease characterized by an inability to name objects
  -Patients are unable to name objects presented visually, verbally, or by touch because they have a deficit with the knowledge itself, not with processing input from one of the senses
• These patients progressively lose all semantic knowledge
• Their speech is fluent but devoid of content because they have lost semantic representations of the world
• Patterson et al. (2007) described a patient with semantic dementia who was able to remember the route to a friend’s house that he hadn’t visited in many years, but asked his wife, “What are those things?” as he passed sheep beside the road on the way there

Question 70

What part of the brain is associated with semantic dementia?

Answer 70

• Semantic dementia is associated with the degeneration of neurons in the anterior temporal lobe
• Because of the co-occurrence of ATL atrophy and symptoms of semantic dementia, researchers have proposed that semantic knowledge is localized to ATL

Question 71

Why is the localization of semantic memory in the brain not as simple as saying it’s located in the ATL?

Answer 71

• First, damage to ATL doesn’t always result in the same pattern of semantic knowledge loss
• Ex: patients with neural degeneration resulting from the herpes simplex virus often display category-specific semantic memory deficits. These patients also display ATL atrophy, yet their conceptual knowledge loss is much less severe than that observed in patients with semantic dementia
• If semantic memory is localized to ATL, you would expect all patients with similar damage to display similar behavioral impairments
• Furthermore, neuroimaging research on healthy brains rarely demonstrates ATL activation during tasks involving semantic memory
• Instead, neurologically intact brains display widely distributed activity across a variety of semantic processing tasks

Question 72

Describe the hub-and-spoke model proposed by Karalyn Patterson, Mathew Lambon Ralph and their colleagues

Answer 72

• A model of knowledge representation
• According to this model, generalized and abstract semantic knowledge is stored in a semantic memory hub in the ATL
• Ex: this is where your general knowledge of “apple” would be stored, including all the places you could find an apple and all its different uses
• In addition to this abstract knowledge hub, context-dependent, and modality-specific detail about items is stored in “spokes” that are distributed across the cortex
• Ex: what different apples look like would be stored in visual processing brain areas, what an apple tastes like would be stored in taste perception cortical areas, and how to hold an apple would be stored in motor cortical areas
• This model can help to explain the seemingly contradictory results from brain imaging studies and patients with semantic dementia, as well as bring together old and new ideas from cognitive psychology about how semantic knowledge is processed

Question 73

Describe how transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) has provided evidence that supports a hub-and-spoke organization of semantic knowledge in the brain

Answer 73

• TMS is a noninvasive technique that uses a magnetic field to stimulate cortical neurons in a localized part of the brain
• When neurons are stimulated using TMS, their normal activity is disturbed, creating what is sometimes called a “virtual lesion.”
• When the magnetic field is removed, neural function returns to normal
• Probic, Jefferies, and Ralph (2010) applied TMS to the ATL and inferior parietal lobule (IPL) of healthy participants while participants named pictures of both living and non-living things
• When the ATL was stimulated, the time it took participants to name all pictures of objects increased
• This supports the role of the ATL as a general semantic hub because it was difficult for participants to retrieve all types of semantic information when this area was not functioning properly
• When the IPL was stimulated, the time it took participants to name non-living things increased, but there was no effect on the naming speed of living things
• On further analysis, it turned out that naming speed was only slowed for non-living things that could be manipulated with the hands (such as a pen) but not for non-living things that aren’t typically manipulated with the hands (such as a sofa)
• These observations support the role of the IPL as a modality-specific spoke for items that we interact with by grasping
• Together, the results provide some compelling evidence that semantic knowledge is stored in both a localized and distributed way in our brains

Question 74

What is the function of the inferior parietal lobule (IPL)?

Answer 74

IPL is a cortical region that is known to be involved in visually guided hand movements and corresponds to a spoke in the hub-and-spoke model

Question 75

What was Aristotle’s take on imagery?

Answer 75

Aristotle believed imagery was central to thought and, in fact, wrote that “It is impossible to think without an image”

Question 76

What did early philosophers question about imagery?

Answer 76

They questioned whether images were mental copies of the world or whether they were something else entirely

Question 77

What was John B. Watson’s perspective on imagery?

Answer 77

He called imagery “sheer bunk” and instead suggested that what we experience as imagery can be better described as over-practiced language

Question 78

What’s one difficulty for the scientific investigation of imagery?

Answer 78

• That it’s inherently introspective and cannot be verified by others
• For this reason, the study of imagery was avoided by behaviorists and wasn’t seriously studied again until cognitive psychology was established

Question 79

What’s mental imagery?

Answer 79

• The experience of mentally creating a perceptual experience in the absence of a physical stimulus
• Imagery is possible for all our sensory modalities
• You can create mental images of stimuli that you have never experienced

Question 80

What kind of mental imagery are you experiencing when you get a song stuck in your head?

Answer 80

Auditory imagery

Question 81

What kind of mental imagery are you experiencing when you imagine the soft touch of a feather lightly brushing against your arm?

Answer 81

Tactile imagery

Question 82

What kind of mental imagery are you experiencing when you imagine the smell of freshly baked bread?

Answer 82

Olfactory imagery

Question 83

What kind of mental imagery has received the most attention in cognitive psychology, and the associated research has produced prolific results?

Answer 83

Visual imagery

Question 84

Why do we say questions about the nature of imagery are questions about the nature of knowledge?

Answer 84

• Part of knowing what an apple is, is knowing what it looks like, tastes like, and smells like
• When you think of an apple, you may access abstract knowledge of apple-ness, but you may also create a mental image of an apple

Question 85

The idea that thought could be represented by words and mental pictures was popularized by what theory from Allan Paivio?

Answer 85

Dual coding theory

Question 86

Describe Allan Paivio’s dual coding theory

Answer 86

• A theory about knowledge representation that proposes knowledge can be stored as an abstract verbal code or an analog imagery-based code
• Paivio’s theory proposed that human knowledge was represented by 2 separate systems: a verbal system and a nonverbal, imagery system
• One key feature of a verbal system is that it is a type of abstract code
• The dual coding theory was influential in shaping the way cognitive psychologists thought about imagery, however, it wasn’t a theory about imagery, per se
• For Paivio, imagery and language are 2 systems that we used to represent the content of thought, but it didn’t deal with the question of the nature of imagery itself

Question 87

What’s an abstract code?

Answer 87

• An arbitrary symbol system in which the symbols don’t resemble their real-world referent
• Ex: the word dog in English doesn’t in any way resemble a real-life dog. The letters D-O-G don’t look like a dog, they don’t sound like a dog, they don’t feel like a dog, and so on. They are simply a string of sounds that English speakers have agreed by convention will stand for the four-legged, furry, domesticated animal that is a dog

Question 88

What are onomatopeia?

Answer 88

• A word that resembles the sound of the item it is referring to
• Ex: “quack” or “boom”

Question 89

Why do we say onomatopoeia is more of an exception than a rule to the abstract code?

Answer 89

• It can be thought of as an attempt to mimic a sound rather than a word that denotes a particular meaning
• In any case, it is also true that onomatopoeia for the same sound can be quite different in different languages
• Ex: in English a turkey makes a gobble-gobble sound, but in Finnish a turkey says klu klu klu

Question 90

Describe Paivio’s nonverbal imagery system in the dual coding theory

Answer 90

• It’s based on sensorimotor information and is modality-specific
• The information contained in an image is linked to specific sensory input and motor output in our bodies
• The consequence of this is that images resemble what they stand for in the world -> images are analog codes

Question 91

What’s an analog code?

Answer 91

• A way to store information that resembles the physical stimulus being represented
• Analog codes retain the perceptual features of the physical stimulus they represent
• Ex: if you create a visual image of a dog, it will “look like” the dogs you have previously seen

Question 92

What’s the imagery debate?

Answer 92

• A theoretical debate among cognitive psychologists about whether images are stored as pictures in our minds or as propositions
• It has largely been driven by 2 researchers: Stephen Kosslyn and Zenon Pylyshyn
• The imagery debate is not concerned with whether mental images exist or whether we can use imagery for other cognitive tasks
• The major debate concerns the format, or code, that imagery takes in our mind -> whether imagery uses a picture-like code or a language-like code
• Fundamental question: “What comes first: the image or the idea?”
• Both sides agree that propositions are used to represent knowledge, however, Kosslyn argues that imagery is just as fundamental to cognition as are propositions

Question 93

Describe Stephen Kosslyn’s perspective on the imagery debate

Answer 93

• For Kosslyn, images are depictive representations
• Ex: if you imagine your kitchen, you know where everything is because it is stored in your semantic memory

Question 94

What are depictive representations?

Answer 94

A type of analog code that maintains the perceptual and spatial characteristics of physical objects

Question 95

What are descriptive representations?

Answer 95

A symbolic code used to represent knowledge that is abstract and does not resemble a stimulus in the real world

Question 96

What’s the major difference between depictive and descriptive representations?

Answer 96

• Descriptive representations don’t preserve the perceptual and spatial information of your real kitchen; they contain only the conceptual information
• That is, while you know the toaster is to the right of the stove, only depictive representations maintain the relative distance between objects

Question 97

Describe Zenon Pylyshyn’s perspective on the imagery debate

Answer 97

• For Pylyshyn our experience of mental imagery isn’t enough to tell us the true format that we use to store knowledge
• He claims that images are epiphenomena, or by-products of more fundamental cognitive processing
• Pylyshyn argues that cognitive processing fundamentally relies on manipulating cognitive symbols called propositions
• Propositional theory that proposes all knowledge is represented as a propositional code
• Propositions are able to describe the relationship between items
• The argument goes that a propositional code is the only code that’s needed for all thought with no need to complicate things with imagery or anything else, for that matter
• A proposition isn’t the same thing as language
• Propositions contain abstract conceptual knowledge which can be conveyed to someone else using language or images, both of which are argued to be secondary to propositions

Question 98

What’s epiphenomena?

Answer 98

• A by-product that arises from a process but does not have a causal effect on that process
• Ex: imagine you’re typing an essay on your laptop while sitting on the bed. As you work, your laptop generates heat. The longer you work, the more heat is generated. By the end, you have typed a lot of words and generated a lot of heat, however, the heat didn’t cause the essay to get written. It was merely a by-product (or epiphenomenon) of computer processing

Question 99

What’s a proposition?

Answer 99

An idea unit that can be verified as true or false

Question 100

What’s one way that researchers have tried to resolve the imagery debate?

Answer 100

• By conducting experiments to observe whether people process images in the same way that they process real stimuli
• The idea is if images are depictive and maintain the perceptual and spatial characteristics of the real world, then people should process images and physical stimuli similarly
• If, on the other hand, images are epiphenomena of abstract propositions, then mental processing would depend on the number of propositions instead of perceptual and spatial characteristics of stimuli

Question 101

One of Kosslyn’s earliest experiments used what kind of technique to investigate whether images did indeed maintain the spatial characteristics of physical stimuli?

Answer 101

A mental scanning technique

Question 102

What’s mental scanning?

Answer 102

An experimental technique in which participants are asked to scan their mental images while response time is measured

Question 103

Describe Kosslyn’s early experiment that investigated whether images maintain the spatial characteristics of physical stimuli

Answer 103

• He used a mental scanning technique
• He reasoned that if visual images are analog codes of physical stimuli, it should take longer to process larger mental distances than shorter distances, just as it would take more time to travel longer physical distances than shorter ones
• First, he presented participants with line drawings to memorize
• All of the objects in the drawings are elongated such that they have an obvious top and bottom or left and right
• Once the pictures had been memorized, participants were told to create a mental image of one of them and focus their attention on a part of the object at either the extreme top or bottom, left or right (specified by the experimenter)
• Next, participants were told to “look on” their mental image for another part of the object and press a button if they “saw” it in their image

Question 104

Describe the results of Kosslyn’s early experiment that investigated whether images maintain the spatial characteristics of physical stimuli

Answer 104

• Participants’ reaction times to press the button perfectly matched Kosslyn’s prediction: The farther away participants had to shift their attention to find the new part of the object, the longer the search time
• This finding supports the idea that images are depictive representations that maintain the spatial arrangements of physical objects
• There is another possible explanation for the results: perhaps participants were storing information from the line drawings as a list of features and were searching through the memorized list rather than “looking” at a mental image
• The more items on the list to search through, the longer the reaction time, just like Kosslyn found
• The results of Kosslyn’s first experiment could, therefore, be explained equally well as depictive representations or as propositions

Question 105

How can both a depictive representation theory and propositional theory make the same prediction about reaction time in Kosslyn’s early experiment on the imagery debate?

Answer 105

Because it should take participants longer to identify whether the flower has petals than whether it has leaves, either because there’s a longer distance to travel (depictive representation) or because there are more attributes to search through (propositional representation)

Question 106

Describe the second experiment Kosslyn conducted on the imagery debated

Answer 106

• Participants memorized a drawing of a map with 7 different landmarks
• Participants were told to visualize one of the landmarks, then to scan their mental image until they “arrived” at another landmark
• In this experiment, the distances between landmarks differed but there were never any additional landmarks or properties in between them
• The results showed that, similarly to Kosslyn’s original experiment, reaction time to mentally travel between landmarks increased as the physical distance between them increased
• Because the distance between landmarks varied but the number of properties remained constant between all landmarks, Kosslyn could conclude that visual images maintained the relative distance of the real picture and were not influenced by the number of landmarks present

Question 107

Describe Shepard and Metzler’s (1971) mental rotation experiment

Answer 107

• Designed to investigate the time it took to mentally rotate mental images of abstract figures
• They reasoned that if the mind is performing a process that is fundamentally similar to the rotation of real objects then we can make the following prediction: the bigger the angular distance between the two objects that need to be compared, the longer it should take to compare them
• In the real world, the more you have to rotate an object, the more time it takes to do so
• Therefore, if we were doing something like rotating the object in our mind’s eye it should take us longer to respond when the angular distance is greater
• In their experiment, participants saw 2 drawings of 3D objects and were asked to identify whether they were the same or different
• In some of the trials, 2 identical shapes were presented but one of the objects in the pair had been rotated around a vertical axis (“same” objects)
• In the other half of the trials the two objects were different from each other

Question 108

Describe the findings of Shepard and Metzler’s (1971) mental rotation experiment

Answer 108

• Shepard and Metzler reported a remarkably linear relationship between the amount of angular rotation and the time it took participants to determine that the shapes were the same
• They were able to work out that participants could mentally rotate the objects at a rate of about 60° per second

Question 109

Why are the findings from mental rotation experiments important for the imagery debate?

Answer 109

Because what participants were doing mentally is similar to what would happen if they had been physically rotating real objects: the greater the distance, the more time it takes to rotate the object

Question 110

Describe Kosslyn’s (1975, 1978) study on mental scaling

Answer 110

• He asked participants to imagine various animals standing next to either an elephant or a fly -> this was done to establish the scale of the animals
• Kosslyn then asked participants about the properties of the animals
• Ex: “Does the mouse have claws?”
• Participants were faster to answer the questions when the animal was being imagined next to a fly (and was relatively big) compared to when it was imagined next to an elephant (and was relatively small)
• Kosslyn reasoned that participants needed to mentally “zoom in” to “see” the details of the relatively small mouse standing next to an elephant
• This mental zooming takes time, just like walking toward a real mouse to see details does
• If the mouse is next to a fly, the details can easily be seen (both on the real object and image) because it is relatively big, so reaction time is faster

Question 111

What did Kosslyn do in his mental scaling study to establish that the increased reaction time was caused by the relative size of the image and not something else (like the number of facts known about the animals)?

Answer 111

• He had participants imagine a mouse standing next to an elephant-sized fly and a fly-sized elephant
• This time, the reaction times were completely reversed: participants responded faster to the question about the mouse when it was standing next to the elephant compared to when it was imagined next to the fly
• Reaction time to answer questions about the visual details of animals depended on the relative size of the image
• Participants’ responses were faster for the larger images
• This pattern of responses supports the idea that images are processed similarly to real objects

Question 112

One of the earliest demonstrations supporting the claim that imagery and perception share mechanisms comes from what?

Answer 112

• A classic experiment by Perky (1910)
• She asked participants to create visual images of everyday items, such as a book or a lemon, while she projected very dim pictures of those same items on a screen in front of participants
• The remarkable finding was that participants described their images to match the pictures being projected (for example imaging a blue book), but they had no idea they were actually seeing the objects
• Participants mistook their perception for imagery
• This isn’t uncommon if the real stimulus is weak enough

Question 113

Describe the experiment by Segal and Fusella (1970) on the interference of perception by imagery

Answer 113

• They had participants perform a perceptual detection task while simultaneously performing an imagery task
• Participants were told they would either see a picture of a blue arrow (the visual stimulus), hear a note played by a harmonica (the auditory stimulus), or there would be nothing at all
• It was the participants’ task to indicate which stimulus was present, if at all
• Both the visual and auditory stimuli were presented at very low intensities making the detection task quite difficult
• While completing the detection task, participants were instructed to either visualize a tree or the sound of a telephone ringing (back when all telephones made the same ringing sound!)
• Results: detection rates of visual stimuli were lower when participants were imagining a tree compared to when they were imagining the sound of a telephone, and detection rates of auditory stimuli were lower when participants were imagining the sound of a telephone compared to visualizing a tree
• Visual imagery interfered with visual perception and auditory imagery interfered with auditory perception

Question 114

What do the results of the experiment by Segal and Fusella (1970) on the interference of perception by imagery show?

Answer 114

• These results support the claim that imagery and perception share the same mechanisms
• The idea is that if imagery uses the same mechanisms as perception, then imagining a visual stimulus, for example, would “use up” some of the processing mechanisms available for vision

Question 115

Describe Farah’s study (1985) on how imagery can facilitate perception

Answer 115

• She showed participants very faint pictures of either the capital letters T or H or participants saw blank slides
• Just like Segal and Fusella (1970), participants performed a detection task while simultaneously performing an imagery task, except this time only visual information was used
• Participants were instructed to create a visual image of either the capital letter T or H while performing the detection task (detect an actual letter T or H)
• Farah found that in this case, imagery facilitated perception
• Participants were more accurate at detecting the same letter that they were imagining compared to when they were imagining the other letter
• This experiment showed that when only visual stimuli were used, imagery could help perception by giving it a boost

Question 116

What are motion aftereffects?

Answer 116

• A perceptual experience that occurs after exposure to motion in one direction in which a static scene appears to move in the opposite direction of the previously viewed motion
• Visual aftereffects are a type of visual illusion that occur after prolonged viewing of a visual stimulus and are known to result from the activity of cells in the visual system

Question 117

Describe Winawer and colleagues (2010) study on motion aftereffects

Answer 117

• They had participants imagine motion in one direction for 60 seconds
• They found that imagining motion was enough to later bias participants’ perception of motion and create a motion aftereffect
• Since a motion aftereffect occurs because of activity of cells in the visual system, it can be inferred that imagery makes use of those same cells

Question 118

How does introspection tell us that we don’t experience imagery and perception in the same way?

Answer 118

• With the exception of a few unusual (or experimentally contrived) situations, we can tell the difference between when we’re imagining something and when we’re actually perceiving it
• Imagery tends to be weaker and more fleeting than perception

Question 119

What does science rely on?

Answer 119

Falsification

Question 120

What’s falsification?

Answer 120

• A key principle in science in which theories are tested in order to prove they are false, instead of searching for evidence to confirm a hypothesis
• If a researcher finds evidence that confirms their theory, they can’t be sure if it is always true or just true in that particular experiment
• If, on the other hand, a researcher finds evidence against their theory, they can conclude that the theory isn’t supported

Question 121

Some of the early evidence against a depictive explanation of imagery comes from research that investigates what?

Answer 121

Research that investigates imagery of ambiguous figures

Question 122

Describe Reed’s (1974) study on the imagery of ambiguous figures

Answer 122

• He asked participants to memorize pictures of ambiguous figures
• Participants then had to indicate whether new figures were part of the original picture by relying only on their memory
• If participants’ mental images were depictive representations, then they should easily be able to indicate whether the new shapes were part of the original from memory, just as easily as they could if the picture was drawn on a paper in front of them
• Participants were able to accurately indicate whether the new shapes were part of the original in some cases, but accuracy was quite low in other cases
• Reed argued that the results could be explained if participants were giving the picture verbal labels instead of storing their spatial characteristics
• If participants labeled an ambiguous shape as “two overlapping triangles” or “four triangles and a center diamond,” then they can easily identify whether certain shapes (triangles and diamonds) were part of the original
• Participants would have difficulty identifying a parallelogram as part of the original because there’s nothing in the verbal label about a parallelogram
• If participants were storing the image as a depictive representation with the same spatial characteristics as the original picture, then all the new shapes would be equally easy to identify as part of the original
• Because not all of the new shapes were as easily identified as part of the original, this suggested that images may be stored using meaningful verbal labels rather than depictive representations

Question 123

What do other arguments against depictive representations claim that the findings that support depictive representations are a result of?

Answer 123

• Experimenter expectancy
• Demand characteristics

Question 124

What’s the experimenter expectancy effect?

Answer 124

An effect in which an experimenter may unconsciously communicate to participants their expectations about what they expect the results to be, and in turn, causing the participant to unconsciously behave according to the experimenter’s expectations

Question 125

What are demand characteristics?

Answer 125

Subtle cues in experimental tasks or instructions that may bias participants’ behavior

Question 126

How did Pylyshyn counter-argue Kosslyn’s map mental scanning experiment?

Answer 126

• When Pylyshyn asked participants to imagine that you are standing at the tree with the light on. Now imagine that the light at the tree turns off at the exact same time as the light at the lake turns on, he found there was no relationship between the distance between landmarks and the time it took them to “see” the light turning on at various locations
• He argued that the reason Kosslyn et al. (1978) found a relationship between distance and time in their map mental scanning experiment was because participants assumed they were supposed to act “as if” they were travelling around a map and behaved accordingly
• Participants knew that it should take longer to travel farther distances, so they played along, so to speak
• Pylyshyn argues that because participants’ performance varied depending on the task details, it demonstrates that Kosslyn’s results only supported depictive representations because that’s what participants thought they were supposed to do
  -Had the instructions been different, perhaps the results would have been different too

Question 127

Describe Intons-Peterson (1983) study on mental rotation and image scanning

Answer 127

• She trained 4 undergraduate research assistants to test participants using tasks such as mental rotation and image scanning
• However, she told 2 of the research assistants that she expected reaction times would be slower overall for imagery tasks compared to tasks where participants had the physical stimulus to manipulate
• She told the other 2 research assistants the opposite: that reaction time would likely be faster for imagery tasks compared to when the physical stimulus was present
• Even though the research assistants read all participants the same instructions from a printed script, the results ended up matching the research assistants’ expectations
• Intons-Peterson, therefore, demonstrated clearly that the results of imagery experiments could be affected by experimenter expectancies

Question 128

When did a major shift in the imagery debate occur?

Answer 128

• When cognitive neuroscience developed ways to observe participants’ brains while engaged in processing tasks
• Now researchers had a way to observe whether imagery and perception actually used the same brain mechanisms

Question 129

Until the development of modern neuroimaging techniques like positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the only way to learn about brain function was by doing what?

Answer 129

By studying patients with brain damage

Question 130

Describe Policardi and colleagues (1996) analysis of patient TC

Answer 130

• Patient TC suffered cardiac arrest after a car accident that left him with damage to his occipital and temporal lobes, 2 areas that are known to be important for visual perception
• As a result of this damage, TC suffered from cortical blindness
• TC was completely unable to distinguish light from dark
• When an object was moving quickly towards his eye, he failed to move his head or even blink
• This loss of conscious vision was accompanied by a loss in visual imagery
• He was unable to provide any visual descriptions of the place he lived, he performed poorly on tasks that required him to answer questions about visual details of objects and animals (ex: “Is the tail of a mouse long relative to the size of its body?”), and was unable to name the color of common objects from memory
• Here we have a case where damage to the brain results in similar deficits in both perception and imagery abilities

Question 131

Describe Zago and colleagues (2010) analysis of patient PB

Answer 131

• Patient PB had damage to his occipital cortex as a result of a stroke and suffered from cortical blindness similar to patient TC
• However, unlike patient TC, PB performed normally on the same imagery tasks that TC wasn’t able to do

Question 132

Describe Bartolomeo and colleagues (1998) analysis of Madame D

Answer 132

• Madame D suffered damage to a portion of the brain bordering the occipital and temporal lobes due to multiple strokes
• She was able to see and could copy drawings, however, she could not read or visually recognize objects or faces
• She also complained of a lack of color vision
• Despite these visual impairments, her visual imagery remained remarkably unimpaired
• Although she couldn’t recognize objects by sight, she was able to draw them from memory
  -She performed quite poorly on laboratory tests of visual ability but received perfect scores on the analogous imagery tasks
• She reported that if she wasn’t able to recognize an object at her home, she would visualize the objects that were typically found in that location to help her recognize the objects actually present -> she used her intact imagery to facilitate her impaired perception

Question 133

Describe the group of researchers’ analysis of the two patients who lost their ability to use mental imagery after suffering closed head injuries

Answer 133

• Despite deficits in imagery, both patients scored normally on all tests of visual perception, memory and language
• To illustrate the dissociation between perception and imagery in these patients, neither of them were able to draw animals or objects from memory (suggesting difficulties with imagery), however, both were able to accurately copy line drawings of the same objects

Question 134

What’s one difficulty with drawing conclusions from patients with brain damage?

Answer 134

• The damage is rarely localized to a particular brain region and it’s extremely unusual to find multiple patients with the same pattern of damage
• That makes it difficult to draw conclusions about which brain regions may be required for perception and which also support imagery

Question 135

Describe how Kosslyn and his colleagues demonstrated shared brain mechanisms between imagery and perception through neuroimaging

Answer 135

• In one investigation, they used PET to record the activity of the cells in the primary visual cortex (V1) which responds to simple patterns of light such as lines and edges
  -Participants were first asked to memorize pictures of black and white stripes that are known to activate cells in V1
• They then had to answer questions about the lines by visualizing the drawings
• Ex: participants had to imagine the lines in panels 1 and 3 and indicate which lines were thicker
• The PET results demonstrated that imagining the lines activated V1 just like viewing the lines does
• The researchers also used transcranial magnetic stimulation to disrupt the activity of cells in V1 during the same line judgement task
• Participants were less accurate at making judgments about the lines when V1 was disrupted both when viewing the lines and imagining them
• These results indicated that imagery and perception both involve primary visual cortex and suggest that activity in V1 is causally linked to visual imagery

Question 136

Describe Kathleen O’Craven and Nancy Kanwisher (2000) study on brain areas involved with imagery and perception

Answer 136

• They revealed that imagery selectively activates the same specialized areas of the brain as perception
• They were interested in learning whether activity in the fusiform face area (FFA) and parahippocampal place area (PPA) is similar during perceptual and imagery tasks
• In a series of experiments, participants were shown photographs of famous faces and familiar buildings from their college campus and asked to imagine the same faces and buildings
• fMRI revealed that the FFA showed greater activity when viewing and imagining faces compared to buildings, and that the PPA showed greater activity when viewing and imaging buildings compared to faces
• This selective activation of specialized brain areas during both visual and imagery tasks illustrates that imagery shares similar brain areas as perception
• Also, they found that brain activity in FFA and PPA was greater during the visual tasks than the imagery tasks
• This suggests that while perception and imagery may share the same mechanisms, at a neural level, imagery and perception can be distinguished
• They also demonstrated that an observer could correctly predict whether a participant was imagining a face or a building simply by looking at their brain activity -> first demonstration that a single thought could be inferred by examining fMRI data

Question 137

What’s the parahippocampal place area (PPA)?

Answer 137

A brain region located in the inferior temporal lobe that responds preferentially to scenes of places and buildings

Question 138

What has research shown is a major difference between imagery and perception?

Answer 138

• That during visual imagery, but not perception, other nonvisual sensory processing areas, such as the auditory cortex, are deactivated
• Amedi and colleagues suggested that because imagery is more fragile than perception, other sensory areas needed to be turned down so they wouldn’t interfere with visual imagery

Question 139

Describe Ganis and colleagues (2004) research on the brain areas involved with visual imagery and perception

Answer 139

• They found that brain areas involved in planning, cognitive control, attention, and memory (near the front of the brain) showed the most similarity in activity during visual perception and imagery tasks
• There was only limited similarity in the activity in the brain regions involved in visual processing (such as V1) when participants were engaged in perception and imagery tasks
• This pattern of activation makes sense if you consider one obvious difference between imagery and perception: during perception there is a stimulus present
• This stimulus is detected by receptor cells and sent to early processing areas in the brain
• Imagery, on the other hand, lacks any physical stimulus, so we may expect reduced activity in early processing areas of the brain

Question 140

What do Dijkstra and colleagues (2017) believe is what distinguishes imagery and perception?

Answer 140

• That during imagery, higher-level brain areas near the front of the brain, such as the prefrontal cortex, send top-down signals to perceptual processing areas near the back of the brain
• In their view, imagery is like a re-enactment of the perceptual experience where the same perceptual neurons are activated by frontal brain areas instead of a physical stimulus

Question 141

How is imagery linked to the theory of embodied cognition?

Answer 141

• According to some ideas about embodied cognition, knowledge is stored as a distributed pattern of modality-specific neural activity
• When you think about an apple, you activate visual areas relating to what an apple looks like, and taste areas related to the flavor of an apple
• Extending this idea to imagery, when you imagine an apple, you activate the same neural areas as when you perceive it
• According to an embodied view of cognition, simulation is how information is represented as our bodies interact with the physical and social world
• Imagery is just one example of using simulation to interact with the world around us

Question 142

Describe Ragni and colleagues (2020) study on MVPA and perceiving and imagining everyday objects

Answer 142

• They wanted to know whether the same MVPA algorithm could identify both perceiving and imagining everyday objects, which would indicate that they shared similar brain activity
• They had participants both view and imagine drawings of lower-case letters, simple shapes, and objects
• Using MVPA they were first able to correctly determine which object participants were imagining based on patterns of activity from earlier imagery trials
• They were also able to correctly predict which objects participants were imagining based on earlier patterns of activity from perception trials
• That is, there was enough similarity between patterns of brain activity during perception and imagery that the experimenters could use data from viewing a triangle to predict when a participant was imagining a triangle, supporting a shared mechanism between perception and imagery

Question 143

The ability for computers to create realistic images is made possible with what?

Answer 143

Generative adversarial networks (GANs)

Question 144

What are generative adversarial networks (GANs)?

Answer 144

• Artificial neural nets that are put in competition with each other in which one network tries to generate images and the other tries to pick out the artificially generated images from real images
• This technique has been very successful in generating novel images
• The images generated by GANs today are so realistic that they can easily fool an average human observer
• Although GANs have been used for malicious intent (and just for fun), they also promise positive applications
• Ex: GANs can be used to help doctors diagnose abnormalities such as tumors or cardiovascular disease

Question 145

Describe the process of generative adversarial networks (GANs)

Answer 145

• First a generator network is trained to generate new images by recognizing and reproducing patterns from photographs it is shown
• The goal of the generator model is to produce novel images that are indistinguishable from real images
• A discriminator network uses pattern recognition to try to discriminate the original images from the newly generated ones
• Working in competition, these two networks train each other: the generator produces better images to trick the discriminator and the discriminator gets better at identifying the counterfeits

Question 146

What are deep fakes?

Answer 146

Videos made using ANNs, frequently GANs, to impersonate people and show them doing and saying things they never said or did

Question 147

What do most researchers agree on today concerning the imagery debate?

Answer 147

They agree that imagery isn’t only stored as abstract propositions and that imagery arises from similar brain mechanisms as perception

Question 148

The importance of visual imagery that was described by ancient Greeks 2500 years ago was taught as a method to do what in the early 1900s

Answer 148

It was taught as a method to improve memory in the early 1900s, and was among the first reliable effects demonstrated in memory research

Question 149

Memory is better when the to-be-recalled items are stored as what?

Answer 149

• Memory is better when the to-be-recalled items are stored as pictures compared to words
• A particularly effective way to use imagery to help memory is to imagine interactive images

Question 150

What did Bower’s (1970) study find about memory?

Answer 150

It found that memory was better for items remembered as interactive images compared to words and single images

Question 151

What’s the picture superiority effect?

Answer 151

• An effect in which memory is better for pictures than for words
• This effect has been demonstrated in research many times

Question 152

Describe Paivio and Csapo’s (1973) study on the picture superiority effect

Answer 152

• They asked participants to read words or say the name of a picture out loud (the verbal label condition), or to imagine a visual image of the words and pictures (the imagery condition)
• Participants were then given a surprise memory test
• Over a number of conditions, participants’ memory was better for images than words
• For the words that had been imagined as a visual image, recall doubled compared to the words that were only encoded with verbal labels
• Furthermore, recall for words that had been encoded with images was the same as recall for images alone

Question 153

How does Paivio explain the picture superiority effect using his dual-coding theory?

Answer 153

• According to Paivio, when we see a picture, we automatically create a visual representation (analog code) and give it a verbal label (abstract code)
• When we read a word, on the other hand, we only generate the verbal label
• The benefit of images, therefore, is that we store them in memory using 2 codes instead of only one
• Having 2 copies of something stored in memory increases the likelihood that it will be retrieved

Question 154

What did Paivio use to explain the concreteness effect?

Answer 154

The dual-coding theory

Question 155

What’s the concreteness effect?

Answer 155

An effect in which memory is better for concrete words (ex: flag, pen, and chair) than abstract words (ex: belief, luck, and anxiety)

Question 156

How did Paivio use the dual-coding theory to explain the concreteness effect?

Answer 156

• He proposed that concrete words are easier to imagine visually so we are likely to spontaneously create a visual image in addition to the verbal label when trying to remember them (2 codes)
• Abstract words are harder to visualize so we only use one verbal code to try to remember them

Question 157

Describe the evidence that Parker and Dagnall (2009) provide to support Paivio’s explanation of the concreteness effect

Answer 157

• They had participants listen to a list of abstract and concrete words that they were told they would need to remember later
• While listening to the words, 1/2 of the participants looked at a screen with a static visual noise display
• The other 1/2 of participants listened to the words while watching a dynamic visual noise display (DVN)
• DVN is known to interfere with the ability to create images
• They argued that if the concreteness effect happens because people create an image of the concrete words they need to remember, then interfering with the ability to create an image should cause the concreteness effect to go away
• They reasoned that DVN would interfere with visual imagery more than a static visual noise display
• The results demonstrated the classic concreteness effect, but only in participants who watched the static visual noise display
• Participants in the DVN condition remembered the concrete and abstract words equally well
• As Parker and Dagnall predicted, interfering with the ability to create visual images removed the benefit of concrete words over abstract words in memory

Question 158

What’s the role that imagery plays in emotion?

Answer 158

• Imagery is particularly effective at evoking emotional reactions
• In people who have not been diagnosed with psychological disorders, imagining fearful images increases heart rate and signs of the fight-or-flight response

Question 159

Describe Emily Holmes and her colleagues’ (2005, 2006, 2008) experiments on imagery and emotions

Answer 159

• They demonstrated that not only does imagery evoke emotions, but it is more effective in doing so than verbal processing
• In these experiments, participants listened to short descriptions of possible events with either negative or positive outcomes
• Ex: in the negative outcome condition, participants heard scenarios like “You are at work when you hear the fire alarms go off. You run to the exit when you discover that it is for real.” In the positive outcome condition, participants heard scenarios like “You are at home alone watching TV. You must have been dozing because you suddenly wake up. You have the impression that you heard a frightening noise and then realize with relief that it was your partner returning home.”
• 1/2 of the participants were instructed to imagine visual images of these scenarios, while the other half of participants were told to focus on the meaning of the words
• After listening to 100 negative and positive scenarios, the researchers measured participants’ anxiety and positive emotional states
• Those in the imagery group had higher rates of anxiety than the verbal group after listening to scenarios with negative outcomes
• However, the imagery group also had higher scores on the measure of positive emotions after listening to the scenarios with positive outcomes
• Imagining the scenes increased participants emotional response in the direction of the outcome compared to using a verbal code alone

Question 160

Negative intrusive imagery is a hallmark of what?

Answer 160

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)

Question 161

What’s a quality of imagery?

Answer 161

Vividness

Question 162

What’s vividness?

Answer 162

Refers to how clearly we can create an image in our mind’s eye

Question 163

Provide examples of how vividness of mental imagery varies across individuals and contexts?

Answer 163

◦ Familiarity may enhance vividness of mental images (Baddeley & Andrade, 2000)
◦ Musicians seem to hear musical imagery more often than non-musicians (Beaty et al., 2013)

Question 164

Describe individual differences in imagery

Answer 164

• When recalling past personal events, some people tend to do this primarily with visual images and others with words
• We can compare use of different types of imagery across these “visualizers” (using visuals to describe past events) and “verbalizers” (using words to describe past events)
• Visual Imagery: Visualizers = Verbalizers
• Auditory Imagery: Visualizers < Verbalizers

Question 165

What are different evidence for the imagery debate?

Answer 165

• Evidence from mental scanning
• Evidence from mental rotation
• Evidence from mental scaling

Question 166

Describe Crowder (1989) study on imagery and perception

Answer 166

• He conducted a series of experiments examining participants judgements of musical tones
• In this experiment, he played participants a tone from a specific instrument (timbre)
• Question: is the pitch of the 2 tones the same or different?
• Participants were faster at responding when the tone was played by the same instrument -> performed on a purely perceptual task
  For the auditory imagery part of the study:
  1) People are presented with a pure tone (single frequency, no harmonic spectrum), and are asked to imagine this tone played by a specific instrument (guitar, flute, or trumpet)
  2) People are presented with a second tone played by one of three instruments (guitar, flute, or trumpet)
  3) People judge whether the second tone is the same as or different from the first tone
• People were faster at saying that 2 notes were the same when the perceived timbre was consistent with the heard timbre

Question 167

Describe Halpern, Zatorre, Bouffard, & Johnson, (2004) study of auditory imagery vs auditory perception

Answer 167

• Participants either listened to or imagined sounds inside an fMRI scanner
  1) Perception: Sound of the instrument with its corresponding name on the screen presented to participants
  2) Auditory Imagery: Participants imagine sounds corresponding to the instrument name presented on the screen
• From using a conjunction map that determines overlap of perception and imagery, they determined that there’s some neural overlap in these 2 tasks

Question 168

Imagery is important for memory in tasks that require what?

Answer 168

Specialized skills

Question 169

Describe the experiment by Highben & Palmer (2004) where different types of perceptual feedback were taken away from musicians (testing imagery and memory)

Answer 169

• Different types of perceptual feedback that we may get when playing piano (tactile feedback and auditory feedback)
• They wanted to look at what happens when we take away that feedback
  Different conditions:
  1) Normal performance feedback
  Play normally through the piece of music
  2) Motor only performance feedback
  Play through the piece of music without hearing the performance,
  imagine what it sounds like
  3) Auditory only performance feedback
  Hear the piece of music, imagine what the movements feel like
  4) No performance feedback
  Imagine what the piece of music sounds like, and what the movements feel like

Question 170

What’s PTSD and how is it linked with imagery?

Answer 170

• PTSD occurs when a person re-experiences a traumatic event involving involuntary and unwanted memories
• These flashbacks often involve vivid visual and auditory images of the trauma
• During PTSD flashbacks, people often respond as though they are re-experiencing the event, including changes to the autonomic nervous system (e.g. increased heart rate and sweating) and re-enacting behaviors of the event such as ducking or hiding
• The likelihood of flashbacks and the severity of PTSD is related to imagery
• People who score higher on measures of imagery vividness are more likely to experience intrusive images after negative events
• However, the intrusive memories that occur during PTSD don’t always take the form of imagery
• The frequency of intrusive memories doesn’t predict the severity of PTSD; however, the “realness” of imagery associated with the intrusive memories does

Question 171

How are anxiety and depression linked with imagery?

Answer 171

• Anxiety disorders are characterized by intense, persistent and excessive worry that often interferes with daily life
• There are many types of anxiety disorders including generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), social anxiety disorder and specific phobias
• Depression is experienced as persistent feelings of sadness frequently accompanied by of a loss of interest in everyday activities
• Anxiety and depression are associated with both increases and decreases in imagery
• People with anxiety disorders experience increased negative images of future events than those without anxiety
• The more a person imagines a negative event occurring in the future, the likelier they are to believe it will actually happen, which can increase anxiety even more
• One theory of GAD is that excessive worry is a coping mechanism used to reduce the occurrence of intrusive negative images of future events
• Because worry happens in a verbal code, and verbal codes are less vivid than imagery, worry might be a way to reduce the negative emotions associated with anxiety
• Depression is also associated with increased negative imagery and in depressed individuals, imaging suicidal acts can increase the risk of suicide
• Depression is also uniquely linked to a decrease in the vividness and frequency of positive imagery
• Those with depression easily imagine negative future events and have trouble imagining anything positive happening

Question 172

How does imagery play a role in evidence-based treatments for PTSD, anxiety disorders and depression?

Answer 172

• Through imagery rescripting
• This is a technique that’s gaining popularity to treat a number of disorders that are linked to abnormal imagery
• During imagery rescripting, patients are guided through memories of past negative or traumatic experiences and instructed to imagine their younger selves acting in a way they wish they could have during the event
• Sometimes patients imagine their current selves protecting they younger selves when it was needed
• The goal of imagery rescripting is to replace negative memories with neutral or positives ones
• Imagery rescripting has successfully been used to treat PTSD, depression and anxiety
• Treatments that focus on imagery have the highest success rate of treating PTSD

Question 173

Describe Francis Galton’s (1880) study of a group of scientists’ mental imagery

Answer 173

• Francis Galton (1880) was among the first to attempt to study mental imagery scientifically when he asked a group of scientists to describe their breakfast
• To his surprise, some of the scientists could describe their breakfast table in vivid detail, whereas others reported no experience of mental imagery whatsoever

Question 174

What are the 2 approaches that scientists have taken to measure mental imagery?

Answer 174

1. By using self-report questionnaires where participants answer questions about their imagery experiences
2. By using objective, performance tests -> one of the most frequently used tests of this type is the Paper Folding Test (PFT)

Question 175

Describe the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ)

Answer 175

• A self-report questionnaire designed to measure the vividness of a person’s visual imagery
• Commonly used questionnaire developed by David Marks in 1973
• This questionnaire asks participants to visualize a scenario and indicate on a scale from 1 to 5 how vivid the scene is
• Ex: participants are asked to visualize the rising sun and to rate 1 if the image is “Perfectly clear and as vivid as normal vision” to 5 if there is “No image at all; you only ‘know’ that you are thinking of an object.”
• Despite being a subjective measure of people’s internal experience, the VVIQ is quite reliable in measuring vividness of imagery between people
• The VVIQ taps into object imagery

Question 176

Describe the Paper Folding Test (PFT)

Answer 176

• A performance-based objective test of visual imagery
• In the PFT, participants view diagrams of a piece of paper being folded, then hole-punched
• The participants’ task is to mentally “unfold” the paper and identify the arrangement of all the holes in the unfolded paper
• The PFT is considered to be a test of spatial ability

Question 177

What’s spatial ability?

Answer 177

• The ability to mentally process information about the spatial relation of objects, their parts, and their locations
• This includes the ability to mentally manipulate and transform objects

Question 178

What’s object imagery?

Answer 178

The ability to mentally process information about the appearance of objects, including information about shape, color, and texture

Question 179

Describe patient MX

Answer 179

• A man who claimed to have completely lost the ability to form mental visual images after undergoing cardiac surgery
• MX had always believed he had above average imagery and relied on it for his job (he was a surveyor) until that day that his mind’s eye went blind
• Corroborating his personal reports, MX scored the lowest possible score on the VVIQ
• fMRI revealed that brain areas that are typically active during imagery (visual cortex and fusiform gyrus) were inhibited in MX when he tried to create visual images

Question 180

What’s congenital aphantasia?

Answer 180

• A condition experienced by about 1%–3% of the population in which an individual is completely unable to form mental images in the absence of any brain injury
• Instead of visual imagery, these individuals described mental experiences like “the shape of an apple if you felt it in your hands in the dark” and “thinking only in radio”
• Although individuals with aphantasia report no subjective experience of imagery and get very low scores on tests of object imagery like the VVIQ, their spatial ability is similar to the rest of the population
• Those with aphantasia report difficulty recalling autobiographical memories and recognizing faces
• Those with aphantasia were particularly likely to be scientists and mathematicians

Question 181

What 2 distinct imagery systems does congenital aphantasia suggest there are?

Answer 181

One for mentally manipulating visual objects and one for imagining object identity

Question 182

A survey of over 2000 people with extreme visual imagery revealed cases of both what and what?

Answer 182

Aphantasia and its opposite phenomenon, hyperphantasia

Question 183

What’s hyperphantasia?

Answer 183

• A condition of having extremely vivid mental imagery, often associated with very high autobiographical memory
• Those with hyperphantasia were more likely employed in creative professions

Question 184

What were Keogh and Pearson (2018) findings on aphantasia and hyperphantasia?

Answer 184

They reported about people with aphantasia having average or above average spatial ability and those with hyperphantasia having exceptional object imagery

Question 185

How many words do most American college-educated speakers have in their vocabulary?

Answer 185

Most American college-educated speakers have a vocabulary of 75,000 to 100,000 words with which they can produce an infinite number of messages

Question 186

Among all of our cognitive abilities, which one stands out as the one that most distinguishes us from other species?

Answer 186

Language

Question 187

What’s psycholinguistics?

Answer 187

The subfield of psychology concerned with linguistic behavior including how we learn, understand and produce language

Question 188

What’s natural language processing?

Answer 188

• The ability to understand and produce language
• Among the most important areas of research in artificial intelligence

Question 189

Why do many researchers believe that language is the final frontier in generating true general artificial intelligence?

Answer 189

Because it would allow computers to think the way we do and understand all of the information we, as a species, have generated

Question 190

What is language necessary for?

Answer 190

Language is necessary for many of the basic functions of human society including the ability to organize into large complex groups, to transfer knowledge between individuals and across generations, and to consider the past and plan for the future

Question 191

How do ants communicate with each other?

Answer 191

• By touching each other using their mouths and antennas
• By doing this they’re passing information through chemicals, called pheromones, that can convey whether they have found a food source along the path

Question 192

How do bees communicate with each other?

Answer 192

Bees communicate the location of a food source in the hive based on a complicated waggle dance in which they tell others in the hive the position of a food source relative to the position of the sun

Question 193

How do male Campbell’s monkeys in the Ivory Coast communicate with each other?

Answer 193

• They combine a small set of basic vocalizations into complex communications, forming something of a proto-syntax
• The monkeys start with a set of three basic sounds: boom, krak, and hok
• They can combine some of these with an oo sound to make two more: krak-oo, hok-oo, and another novel sound, wak-oo, for a grand total of 6 sounds
• For some time, it was thought that these 6 calls were each a single distinct communication

Question 194

Describe research by Ouattara et al. (2009) on male Campbell’s monkeys in the Ivory Coast’s communication

Answer 194

• They found that different sequences of these monkeys’ sounds signaled different information
• Ex: a pair of booms serves to call the rest of the group. However, when the booms are followed by a krak-oo, the sequence appears to signal that danger may be present in a nearby branch, allowing the other monkeys to take appropriate precautions

Question 195

Why is animal communication qualitatively different than human language?

Answer 195

1. Animal communication tends to be highly limited
   - As far as we know, bees can only communicate a few types of information related to the location of a food source. Birds may have bigger repertoires but not by much. Even the Campbell’s monkeys seem to have a fairly limited range of different meaningful sequences
   - People, on the other hand, have a vastly richer repertoire
   - A recent study by Brysbaert et al. (2016) estimated that the average American adult has a vocabulary of over 42,000 words
2. Another difference is the kind of information that human language can convey
   - Animals generally communicate concrete features of the current environment, such as the presence and location of an opportunity or a threat
   - Human language can convey much more complex concepts such as the rules of a game, events from the past, and even abstract concepts such as love and language -> we can’t point to these things in the environment but we can understand their meaning
3. The most fundamental difference between human and animal language is the presence or absence of a grammar for combining words
   - As far as we know, all naturally occurring animal communication is only capable of conveying a fixed set of pieces of information (“Predator over there!” “Give me food!”)
   - Human language, on the other hand, has both a set of fixed symbols (ex: words) but it also has the ability to combine these symbols into an explosively large number of combinations (grammar or syntax)
   - This ability to combine words in novel ways (productivity, digital infinity) has never been observed in any other species besides humans

Question 196

What’s productivity (aka digital infinity)?

Answer 196

A feature of human language in which an effectively infinite number of grammatical sentences are possible

Question 197

What is the most fundamental difference between human language and animal communication?

Answer 197

The presence of grammar

Question 198

The presence of language in people is ______, rather than ______

Answer 198

The presence of language in people is cultural, rather than biological

Question 199

Describe the case of Alex, an African Grey parrot who was trained to produce some remarkable linguistic behaviors

Answer 199

• His trainer, Irene Pepperberg, trained Alex to use over 200 words, including abstract terms such as shape and color as well as some numbers
• These are important because they don’t correspond to any specific stimulus but seem to relay on more abstract concepts
• These capabilities demonstrate that we have underestimated the linguistic capabilities of animals given a sufficiently rich environment
• Despite many years of effort, Alex was never able to generate a novel, multiword sentence using grammar
• His abilities were limited to pairs of words, such as “blue square” or “wood circle”

Question 200

True or False: linguistic research of human sign languages has determined that they are full languages, containing a grammar with the same degree of expressive capability and complexity as spoken language

Answer 200

True

Question 201

Describe the findings from when several researchers attempted to teach sign language to several primate species including chimpanzees and gorillas

Answer 201

• Several of these primates achieved some very impressive capabilities
• Ex: Washoe the chimp learned up to 250 signs, which included abstract signs like more and even combined words to create new ones such as “DIRTY+GOOD” to mean toilet
• Despite these impressive abilities, Washoe and other primates never reached any true linguistic competency such that they could generate novel, multi-sign, sentences
• The scientific consensus is that efforts to teach other primates true sign language were not successful

Question 202

From studying language in animals and teaching them both vocal and sign language, what did scientists conclude?

Answer 202

• Most scientists agree that no animal, trained or otherwise, has demonstrated true language-like productivity to generate novel constructions from a fixed set of symbols
• To date, true language does appear to be unique to humans

Question 203

What’s the nature/nurture debate concerning language acquisition in children?

Answer 203

• Is language entirely learned from scratch based on developmental experience or are we born “pre-equipped” with some linguistic abilities already in place?
• Debate as to whether children are born knowing some properties that pertain to all languages, such as the fact that there are verbs or nouns that behave differently within a language or the fact that there is such a thing as tense (i.e., past, present, etc.)

Question 204

What was behaviourist B.F Skinner’s take on language acquisition in children?

Answer 204

He proposed that all of language is learned based on the same kind of mechanisms as other kinds of skill learning:
1) through trial and error with reinforcement for “correct” or “incorrect” language
2) through modeling of other people’s (e.g., parents’) language behavior

Question 205

What was the linguist Noam Chomsky’s take on language acquisition in children?

Answer 205

• That there’s an innate capacity to learn language that is present prior to any actual language experience, either before birth (i.e., in the womb) or after
• According to this view, some of the basic concepts of language—that there are words, syntax, tense—don’t need to be learned
• It’s only the details of one’s language—which words, which syntax—that need to be learned
• Chomsky proposed the idea of a universal grammar, which contained some of the basic scaffolding of syntax but with the specific details to be learned based on experience
• He even proposed that this grammatical ability emerged due to some specific mutations that changed our brains over a relatively short period of evolutionary history

Question 206

Describe the findings of grammatical ability emerging due to some specific mutations that changed our brains over a relatively short period of evolutionary history

Answer 206

• Some researchers think they have identified an example of such a gene, called FOXP2, that has been found to be important in human language development
• Children who have mutations of this gene often suffer from developmental verbal dyspraxia
• This same gene appears to regulate vocal communication behaviors in other animals as well
• Ex: when scientists “knock out” this gene in female mice (i.e., stop the gene from expressing the proteins it normally produces), they don’t generate the high-frequency vocalizations in response to their pups that regular mice do
• Similarly, FOXP2 knockout in certain songbirds affects their ability to learn and imitate their characteristic songs

Question 207

What’s Chomsky’s idea of a universal grammar?

Answer 207

A theorized set of syntactic linguistic rules that is common across all human natural languages

Question 208

What’s developmental verbal dyspraxia?

Answer 208

A disorder that affects the ability to pronounce syllables and words

Question 209

Why did Chomsky argue that some language capabilities must be innate?

Answer 209

• Because the rules of grammar are often ambiguous just based on examples
• He referred to this as the poverty of the stimulus

Question 210

What’s the poverty of the stimulus?

Answer 210

A proposed phenomenon that states that there is insufficient data for children to learn the rules of grammar based on experience alone

Question 211

What did Chomsky argue about certain grammatical rules?

Answer 211

• Chomsky pointed out that we never explicitly learn certain grammatical rules, certainly not as children
• Yet, kids somehow infer these rules from a limited number of examples
• He argued that this reflects a preexisting set of rules about grammar that precedes the experience

Question 212

Groups of people who move to foreign countries is another example of what?

Answer 212

• It’s another example of people acquiring grammar without sufficient stimuli
• If they move as adults, they often develop limited capabilities in the language of their adopted country
• This form of the language is referred to as a pidgin and it typically has reduced expressive abilities and grammar relative to a native language
• However, the children of pidgin speakers generally take the pidgin language of their parents and turn it into a fully expressive new language, called a creole, by combining the pidgin of their parents with the language of their home country and creating a new grammar
• These children cannot learn this language because they are the first to speak it

Question 213

What’s a pidgin?

Answer 213

A quasi-language that doesn’t contain a full grammar, typically generated by adult immigrants to a location with a different language

Question 214

What’s a creole?

Answer 214

A fully expressive novel language consisting of a combination of 2 preexisting languages, typically generated by children of immigrants who are exposed to their parent’s language alongside that of their current residence

Question 215

Describe the relationship between deaf isolates and language acquisition

Answer 215

• These children will often develop a rudimentary sign language of their own with which to communicate
• This ability suggests that humans have a specialized, perhaps innate, capacity to learn a language, even without sufficient information for learning

Question 216

What are deaf isolates?

Answer 216

People who can’t hear but are not exposed to any real sign language

Question 217

When does language learning begin?

Answer 217

• It begins before birth while the baby is still in its mother’s womb
• Newborns show a preference for their own mother’s voice, which produces more vigorous sucking behavior than a different female voice
• They also show an ability to distinguish between their native language and other languages, also as measured by sucking responses

Question 218

How does language acquisition generally occur for children after birth?

Answer 218

After birth, most children’s language acquisition tends to follow a regular schedule of increasing capability, almost always in the same order and (with some variability) at the same approximate ages

Question 219

Describe the typical milestones of language development in a typically developing child that are common across culture

Answer 219

• 0-3 months: Cooing (open vowel sounds)
• 4-8 months: babbling (consonant + vowel) ex: “ba ba”
• 8 months-1 year: single words (ex: dog and mama)
• 1-2 years: 2-word phrases (ex: “more milk” “daddy up”)
• 2-3 years: explosion of word knowledge; 2-3 word “telegraphic” speech
• 3-4 years: complex multi-word search (ex: “please can I go now?” “mommy is coming home”)

Question 220

Why do the typical milestones of language development indicate an innate form of language acquisition?

Answer 220

• The regularity of this development appears to persist even though there’s a high degree of difference in the linguistic environment in which the infant is raised
• Even deaf isolates appear to follow a similar pattern of linguistic development, beginning with simple gestures around the same time as hearing children start to babble, and progressing to more complex and rich signs roughly along the same timeline as auditory speech
• This developmental progression, even in the absence of structured input from the parents, is often taken as another source of evidence that some language capacities are built in to development without having to be directly learned

Question 221

What’s a factor that can lead to accelerated language learning?

Answer 221

• The presence of child-directed speech (CDS) or infant-directed speech (IDS) which consists of a parent or older sibling speaking directly to a child
• Such speech often involves a way of speaking called motherese
• Stretching out, exaggerating, and repeating sounds as in motherese may help infants identify the beginning and end of speech sounds and draw their attention to important concepts and words
• Studies show that infants actually show a preference for this kind of speech in the first month after birth, looking longer at movies of people enunciating using IDS compared to regular speech
• There’s some evidence that IDS can help children acquire language

Question 222

What’s child-directed speech (CDS) (aka infant-directed speech (IDS))?

Answer 222

• Speech that is tailored to a young infant or child
• Often involves motherese
• While it might accelerate language development, motherese, and any form of CDS, is not necessary to develop language
• A 1982 study of Samoan society by Elenor Ochs found that parents there almost never talk directly to their pre-linguistic children
• Despite this, these children do ultimately develop language abilities, apparently by passively observing the language of others

Question 223

What’s motherese?

Answer 223

• An infant-directed way of speaking that uses sing-song like speech cadences, exaggerated vowel pronunciations, and repetition
• Common across many languages and need not involve an actual mother

Question 224

Describe Liu, Kuhl, & Tsao, (1993) study on the use of CDS/IDS

Answer 224

• They assessed the abilities of 6- to 12-month-old babies to discriminate between different speech sounds
• They used a technique used in developmental studies called the head-turn task
• Using this measure, Liu et al. found that the language abilities of the infants in their study were positively correlated with their mother’s use of elongated and open vowel sounds typical of motherese
• This suggests that motherese may help babies learn the basic building blocks of language

Question 225

Describe the head-turn task

Answer 225

• A behavioral task used to test infant language in which babies are conditioned to turn their heads when they hear a change in a speech sound
• When they correctly turn their head, they are rewarded with a lit-up display with moving toy animals (babies love this)
• By comparing how often the baby turns to actual changes in a speech sound, researchers can assess their language perception abilities

Question 226

What are 3 basic aspects of language that are necessary to understanding speech and that often present inherent ambiguity?

Answer 226

• Phonological
• Lexical
• Parsing

Question 227

What are the phonetic properties of language?

Answer 227

Phonetic properties are the actual sounds that the speaker is making

Question 228

What are the 2 types of phonetic linguistic units that linguists refer to?

Answer 228

Phonemes and Morphemes

Question 229

What are phonemes?

Answer 229

• The smallest unit of speech that can change the meaning of a word
• These are the basic building blocks of language
• They aren’t letters, words, or syllables
• They’re the sounds making up speech
• Ex: the word apple has 3 phonemes (“ah,” “p,” and “l”) while happy has four (“h,” “ah,” “p,” and “ee”)

Question 230

What are morphemes?

Answer 230

• The smallest meaningful units of speech
• These units have to convey some meaning either on their own or in combination with other units of speech
• This includes things like prefixes and suffixes, which are considered their own morphemes because they carry their own meaning
• Ex: the word apple has only one morpheme because it can’t be broken up into smaller meaningful units. However, the word apples has 2 morphemes: “apple” and “s,” which conveys plurality

Question 231

What’s the first goal of language comprehension and what are several basic challenges our brain confronts when trying to do this?

Answer 231

• The 1st goal of language comprehension is correctly identifying phonemes and morphemes in a stream of speech
• Challenges our brain confronts when trying to do this:
  1. The sounds that people make are often highly ambiguous
  2. Figuring out where one morpheme begins and the other ends (speech segmentation) -> because when we speak, we don’t actually pause between words. Instead, words and sentences jumble together without any clear demarcation. This is evident when we examine a visual representation of the magnitude of sound during speech

Question 232

Describe the study by Pollack and Pickkett (1964) where they demonstrated that the sounds that people make are often highly ambiguous

Answer 232

• They secretly recorded the conversations of students who were waiting to participate in a psychology experiment
• Then they spliced out individual words from the recordings and played them back to the people who had originally spoken them
• They found that people could correctly identify the word less than half of the time
• However, when several words from before or after the target word were included, people were better at identifying the word, and the ability increased with more words
• This demonstrates that similar to vision, context plays an important role in speech perception by allowing the brain to combine what sounds or words are likely to be uttered, based on the surrounding speech

Question 233

What’s the phonemic restoration effect?

Answer 233

• First discovered by Warren (1970)
• A more dramatic demonstration of the role of context on perceiving phonetic properties
• A perceptual phenomenon in which sound that is missing or obscured is still perceived if it is highly predictable

Question 234

How did Warren first test the phonemic restoration effect?

Answer 234

• He recorded a spoken sentence and then removed an individual phoneme from the recording and replaced it with a non-speech sound
• Ex: he presented the sentence “the state governors met with their respective legislatures convening in the capital city”
• However, the “s” sound in the word “legislature” was removed and replaced it with the sound of someone coughing
• He then played the whole recording to participants and asked if they noticed any sounds missing
• Most participants didn’t notice any sounds missing and, if they said they did, they chose the wrong sound
• In other words, participants heard an “s” sound that wasn’t really there
• They did so because they had sufficient information to expect that the “s” was there (a top-down effect)

Question 235

What’s another source of phonological perception besides the actual speech signal?

Answer 235

• It comes from the visual information present in a speaker’s mouth
• During speech, the human mouth makes characteristic movements, when speaking different phonemes, and these can be used to determine what phoneme a person is pronouncing
• The idea of reading lips to know what someone is saying is familiar when no sound is available
• However, it turns out that we lipread as an auxiliary speech processing method even when speech sounds are available
• Evidence for this comes from the McGurk effect
• Our brain uses additional info besides the speech stimulus to determine what phoneme is being said

Question 236

Describe Saffran and colleagues (1996) study on speech segmentation

Answer 236

• She invented an artificial language made up of word-like letter strings such as bida or tigo
• These were then strung together into multi-word “phrases.”
• Ex: a typical phrase might be: bidakupadotigolabubidaku….
• In their experiment, they presented these phrases to young infants over a few minutes’ time and then tested to see whether the infants would orient more strongly towards a “word” versus a “nonword” when presented in isolation
• The babies showed a clear bias to look at “nonwords,” which indicates that they found them surprising and novel
• But how did they know which ones were words and which weren’t?
• The answer, according to Saffran, is that babies (and adults) are statistical learners who encode the frequency with which different sounds appear together (e.g., bida but not daku)
• This allows them, and us, to identify likely words

Question 237

What’s lexical processing?

Answer 237

• Determining the meaning of individual words
• Lexical processing can be difficult because individual words often have multiple meanings
• Ex: the English language contains many homophones, words that sound the same but mean different things (ex: ate and eight)
• The same difficulty arises when reading words that are spelled the same but have multiple meanings and/or pronunciations, called homographs (ex: bow)

Question 238

What helps lexical processing with ambiguous words?

Answer 238

• The context in which a word appears is going to play a significant role in disambiguating it
• This isn’t always a straightforward process
• Sometimes the ambiguous word can appear before the disambiguating context, leading us to initially draw an incorrect conclusion
• Ex: “The baseball player picked up the bat.” but this could mean the animal “bat”

Question 239

What’s one reason for the preference for the more common usage of a word?

Answer 239

Common words are actually processed more quickly than less common ones

Question 240

Describe the study by Scarborough, Cortese, & Scarborough (1977) on the preference for common words

Answer 240

• They used an experimental paradigm called the lexical decision task (LDT), in which a string of letters is presented and the participant must decide whether they represent a real word or not, as quickly as they can
• Scarborough et al. used the LDT and found that people were faster at recognizing strings as real words when those words were more common
• ## This means that when a word that has multiple meanings appears, the more frequent meaning beats out the other meanings based on speed alone

Question 241

What’s the lexical decision task (LDT)?

Answer 241

A psychological task in which a participant makes a speedy judgment about whether a given string of letters is a legitimate word or not

Question 242

What was Swinney (1979) questionning about the effects of context on lexical processing?

Answer 242

• Swinney (1979) posed the question of whether a leading context completely blocks a competing meaning from being activated in the first place
• Ex: with the sentence “the reporter explained that she was a member of the press”
• In this case, the meaning of the word press is clear: it is another word for media
• But Swinney wanted to know if the other meaning of the word (to apply pressure) gets activated in our brains as well?
• To test this, Swinney played recordings of spoken sentences in which there was a homophone embedded in a context that made its meaning clear
• Ex: “the garden was filled with spiders and other bugs”
• The word bug is the homophone, which in this case clearly refers to some sort of insect but can also mean a spying device
• To test whether participants also activated the alternative meaning, he had them perform a lexical decision task at the same time that they were listening to the word
• On separate trials, he presented words that were semantically related to either one meaning of the homophone or the other (he also included unrelated words as a control)
• Response times are faster in the LDT when related words are presented together which gives us a way of measuring whether some meaning of a word is activated or not

Question 243

Describe Swinney’s results for his study concerning the effects of context on lexical processing

Answer 243

• For the sentence both ant and spy showed speeded responses
• This suggests that both meanings of the word bug were activated, despite the surrounding context favoring only one (insects)
• Swinney found that this effect was short lived: if the LDT task was presented more than 200 ms after hearing the target word, then only the word related to the meaning supported by the context (ant) was facilitated
• This finding shows that the brain briefly entertains multiple meanings of a word before settling on one based on the rest of the sentence

Question 244

What’s parsing?

Answer 244

Breaking up language into its constituent parts

Question 245

What’s a garden-path sentence?

Answer 245

• A sentence that tends to induce the wrong parsing
• A case in which people almost always derive the incorrect parsing, leading to an interpretational “path” that is a dead end

Question 246

What’s a clause?

Answer 246

• Group of words that express a full idea of someone or something
• The subject (ex: “He,” “The girl,” “The man with the green shirt and yellow pants”) either being or doing something, as described by the predicate or verb (ex: “talked to me,” “dances”)

Question 247

What provides a window into the methods by which our brain overcomes the ambiguity inherent in deriving the syntax of language?

Answer 247

Language errors

Question 248

What are the 2 broad theoretical approaches that have been proposed to answer the question of how we interpret the syntactic structure of language, given its ambiguity?

Answer 248

• Syntax-first approach

Question 249

What’s the syntax-first approach?

Answer 249

• A theory of language parsing that holds that the parsing of a sentence is first derived based on principles of grammar alone, without regard to the meaning of the words, except insofar that their language category (e.g., noun, verb) is concerned
• Several syntax-only approaches have been identified that capture some of the typical parsing behaviors people exhibit when encountering ambiguous language -> ex: late closure
• The syntax-first approach suggests that we don’t take the meaning of words into consideration when first parsing a sentence except to determine which grammatical category they belong to

Question 250

Describe the research by Kako and Wagner (2001) on the syntax-first approach

Answer 250

• They demonstrated this concept by using the opening lines of the famous poem “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll:
• Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves and the mome raths outgrabe
• While many of the words here are nonsensical, the parsing structure is still quite clear to the point that, if one could define these made-up terms, we would know exactly what the sentence means
• In fact, the syntactic structure seems to imply some meaning all on its own

Question 251

What’s late closure?

Answer 251

• A tendency when parsing to attach incoming words to the current phrase
• This principle states that as long as it makes grammatical sense, we tend to attach incoming words to the phrase we are currently processing rather than assuming they belong to a different phrase that is still coming up

Question 252

What’s an example of a garden-path sentence?

Answer 252

“The man who whistles tunes pianos” because it violates late closure

Question 253

Describe Trueswell and colleagues (1994) study that showed how semantics play a role in parsing

Answer 253

• They presented participants with sentences that contained parsing ambiguity and tracked their eye movements to see whether they had to go back and reanalyze each sentence (a clue that they had gone down the wrong garden path) or not
• He found that the meaning of the words, not just their grammatical category, effected their parsing behavior
• Ex: he compared eye movements of these 2 similar sentences:
  1) The defendant examined by the lawyer turned out to be unreliable.
  2) The evidence examined by the lawyer turned out to be unreliable.
• They found that sentence 1 tended to generate garden-path effects, in which participants had to rescan the sentence in order to parse and understand it
• This is because late closure led them to combine the word examined with “The defendant” to form a single subject phrase, which is then inconsistent with the next word, by
• However, sentence 2 did not generally create this confusion, even though the syntax alone should dictate the same parsing, based on late closure
• Participants weren’t inclined to generate the subject phrase “The evidence examined” because they knew that didn’t make semantic sense
• They used the meaning of the words, not just their syntax, to parse the sentence

Question 254

How do psycholinguists study language in the lab and how does this differ from how language is used in the real-world?

Answer 254

• Psycholinguists often study language in the lab using spare stimuli such as written or recorded words presented in isolation of any other stimuli
• However, in the real world, language is often used within a rich contextual environment that may serve to disambiguate what someone is trying to convey
• Ex: If you are talking to your friend and you both notice someone walking into the room, and you say, “That person is really late,” it will be clear who you are talking about, even if there are many other people in the room “that person” could technically refer to

Question 255

Describe Tanenhaus et al. (1995) study on the role of visual context on sentence parsing

Answer 255

• They presented participants with sentences that contained parsing ambiguities, such as the following: “ut the apple on the towel in the box”
• The parsing ambiguity is whether “on the towel” and “in the box” are each referring to the apple or the towel
• As participants were listening to these sentences being read, the researchers also presented them with visual stimuli consisting of different setups of apples, towels, and boxes that led to different likely interpretations of the sentence
• They then tracked people’s eye movements as they listened to the sentence to see how they were interpreting the information as it came along
• Their results demonstrate that under real-life conditions, the intentions of a speaker may often be discernible not just from the words themselves, but from a shared understanding between speaker and listener about what the speaker is trying to say

Question 256

What’s prosody?

Answer 256

• The patterns of stress and intonation (change in pitch) of a speaker
• It can convey critical information over and above the specific words someone uses
• Even when there’s no actual grammatical ambiguity in a sentence, there are additional potential layers of meaning that aren’t conveyed by the words alone

Question 257

In written language, how do we convey information beyond the words themselves?

Answer 257

• Through punctuation
• In some ways, punctuation can be seen as a limited version of prosody and, in many cases, these techniques can serve to disambiguate language

Question 258

What’s bilingualism?

Answer 258

All individuals who use more than one language

Question 259

How do we distinguish bilingual groups?

Answer 259

We distinguish bilingual groups not only with respect to their proficiency, dominance, and age of acquisition in each language but also by virtue of where they live and the demands that are placed on them to use each language

Question 260

Until very recently, most research on language and cognition examined only speakers of how many languages?

Answer 260

• It examined only speakers of a single (typically English) language
• Monolinguals were the model subjects of study
• Only the native language could provide an ideal basis for understanding the nature of language system

Question 261

Bilinguals have been compared to what kind of language users?

Answer 261

• To a special group of language users, much like brain damaged patients, children with language disorders, or deaf individuals
• Each of these groups hold genuine interest for the field, but their performance isn’t necessarily taken to provide the primary source of evidence for the study of language and mind

Question 262

Research on bilingualism was seen as what?

Answer 262

It was seen as something like a boutique (petite and funny)

Question 263

True or False: Learning a second language past early childhood is an easy task

Answer 263

False: Learning a second language past early childhood is a difficult task with different outcomes

Question 264

What did studies on L2 learners and their accents show?

Answer 264

• The older individuals were when first exposed to the L2, the more accented their speech is perceived to be
• Even highly successful late L2 learners speak with an accent and appear to fail to acquire subtle aspects of the L2 grammar

Question 265

Late bilinguals are special with a mixed language system that includes what?

Answer 265

• A full native L1
• A “funky” L2

Question 266

What do we expect with bilingualism?

Answer 266

• Bilinguals should be “functionally monolingual” in the L1.
• The L1 should influence the L2 but not the other way around

Question 267

True or False: Language learning occurs at all ages and language processes are static.

Answer 267

False: Language learning occurs at all ages and language processes are dynamic.

Question 268

Bilingualism provides a tool for researchers to study what about the mind?

Answer 268

How experience influences the functions of the mind/brain

Question 269

Describe 3 discoveries about bilingualism

Answer 269

1. Bilinguals are not two monolinguals in one. Both languages are active and competing. (parallel activation)
2. The bilingual’s language system is permeable in both directions. Critically, the L1 changes in the response to learning and using an L2.
3. Not all bilinguals are the same. Bilinguals differ by virtue of where they live and the demands that are placed on them to use each language.

Question 270

What’s parallel activation?

Answer 270

• Both languages are active regardless of the requirement to use one language alone
• When faced with a task, bilinguals are making an additional decision of which language they need to use
• Why we say bilinguals are “mental jugglers”

Question 271

What are interlingual homographs

Answer 271

Words that share the same form but refer to different meanings of the same image (in the different languages) -> ex: coin

Question 272

What’s a cognate?

Answer 272

A word that matches in form and meaning within different languages (ex: piano)

Question 273

Many studies have demonstrated that bilinguals recognize _____ more quickly but _____ more slowly that control words

Answer 273

• Many studies have demonstrated that bilinguals recognize cognates more quickly but homographs more slowly that control words
• Monolinguals do not show these effects

Question 274

What are examples of memory in daily life?

Answer 274

• Routines and habits (Brushing teeth, Riding bike)
• The sense of self (The facts you have about yourself develop from your experiences)
• Solving problems (You recall similar experience to solve a current problem)
• Social functions (You might recall a funny story to connect with a person)

Question 275

What are the memory processing stages (in order)?

Answer 275

• Encoding
• Storage
• Retrieval

Question 276

Between what stages of the memory processing stages does memory consolidation occur?

Answer 276

• Encoding and storage
• Moving from the encoding memory processing stage to the storage memory processing stage + time = memory consolidation

Question 277

Through consolidation, the memory becomes independent of what brain structure?

Answer 277

The hippocampus

Question 278

How does encoding correlate with brain activity?

Answer 278

A memory trace is formed as a hippocampal-cortical activity pattern

Question 279

How does storage correlate with brain activity?

Answer 279

Via consolidation, a memory is transformed into a stable cortical pattern

Question 280

The hippocampus is very important for what?

Answer 280

• When encoding memories
• The hippocampus encodes a memory, takes it in as a pattern of an encoded memory
• Areas of the cortex involved in the pattern, depends on the nature of the memory

Question 281

How does retrieval correlate with brain activity?

Answer 281

Part of a memory trace is activated by a cue that triggers pattern completion

Question 282

What’s haptic memory?

Answer 282

Very brief memory of a touch

Question 283

What are the different types of sensory memory?

Answer 283

• Gustatory memory
• Olfactory memory
• Echoic memory (Sound-byte held for ~ 3 seconds)
• Haptic memory (Very brief memory of a touch)
• Iconic memory (aka afterimages)
  (Millisecond visual memory….A ‘persistence-of-vision’)

Question 284

What’s a positive afterimage?

Answer 284

A visual memory that represents the perceived image

Question 285

What’s a negative afterimage

Answer 285

A visual memory that’s the inverse of the perceived image
- when the colours of the original image are inversely perceived

Question 286

What comprises the working-memory model?

Answer 286

• Visuo-spatial sketchpad
• Central executive
• Phonological loop

Question 287

What’s the phonological store?

Answer 287

• Passive store for verbal information
• “The inner ear”

Question 288

What’s the articulatory control loop?

Answer 288

• Active rehearsal of verbal information
• “The inner voice”
• Used to convert written material into sounds (reading)
• A specialized role in language

Question 289

What are the 2 parts of the visuo-spatial sketchpad?

Answer 289

• The visual cache
• The inner scribe

Question 290

What’s the visual cache?

Answer 290

• Information about visual features
• Specializes in information about colour, form, etc.

Question 291

What’s the inner scribe?

Answer 291

Information about spatial location, movement and sequences

Question 292

What’s discourse processing?

Answer 292

• Comprehension of naturalistic text, either spoken or written, made up of many sentences in sequence
• Comprehension at this scale involves determining the segmentation of individual words and their meaning
• It also requires integrating both short-term and long-term memory

Question 293

What’s an anaphoric inference?

Answer 293

An inference that connects a reference to an object or person in one sentence (the antecedent) to an object or person in a different sentence (anaphor)

Question 294

What’s causal inference?

Answer 294

An inference about a causal relationship between information in one sentence regarding information in another sentence

Question 295

What’s backward inference?

Answer 295

• AKA necessary inference or deductive inference
• A kind of inference in discourse processing in which previous information is needed in order to process current information

Question 296

What’s elaborative inference?

Answer 296

A kind of inference in discourse processing in which the inferred information is not necessary in order to properly understand the text

Question 297

Describe Johnson, et al. (1973) study on elaborative inference

Answer 297

• They presented participants with a set of sentences including the following:
  1) He slipped on a wet spot and dropped the delicate glass pitcher on the floor
• After this original portion of the study, the researchers introduced a surprise task where the participants didn’t know it was coming and therefore didn’t explicitly prepare for it, in which they had to judge whether sentences had been in the original set they had seen (“old”), or not (“novel”)
• They found that participants who had heard sentence 1 above were likely to rate the following sentence as old:
  2) He slipped on a wet spot and broke the delicate glass pitcher when it fell on the floor.
• This sentence was actually novel
• However, participants appear to have elaborated on the original in a way that was consistent with their general expectations

Question 298

What’s online discourse processing?

Answer 298

When inferences are generated actively while people are listening to or reading some text

Question 299

What’s offline discourse processing?

Answer 299

When inferences are a process that takes place in memory after initial encoding, during memory consolidation or retrieval

Question 300

What behavioral techniques can be applied to attempt to measure online processing?

Answer 300

• Reaction times
• Eye movements

Question 301

Describe Haviland and Clark (1974) study on online discourse processing

Answer 301

• They devised a technique in which participants pressed a keyboard button in order to progress through a sentence at a pace they felt comfortable with
• They compared the time it took for participants to read the following sentence sequences:
  S1) Mary got the picnic supplies out of the car. The beer was warm.
  S2) Mary got the beer out of the car. The beer was warm.
• They found that it took people longer to progress through the second sentence, “The beer was warm,” in the first sequence than in the second one
• They interpreted this as being due to the fact that the first sequence required backward inference in order to understand that the beer had been brought to the picnic in the car, while the second sequence states so explicitly
• This kind of result demonstrates that people engage in “online” inferential reasoning as they are actively processing the text

Question 302

Describe Carpenter (1978) study on online discourse processing

Answer 302

• He measured eye movements while participants read sequences like the following:
  S1) The millionaire died on a dark and stormy night. The killer left no clues for the police to trace.
  S2) The millionaire was murdered on a dark and stormy night. The killer left no clues for the police to trace.
• They found that participants spent longer fixating on the word killer in S1 than in S2, presumably because they had to infer that the death was a murder rather than being told so explicitly
• These results show that people engage in inference at the single word level
• The above results pertain to backward/necessary inferences taking place online

Question 303

What’s instrumental inference?

Answer 303

A form of elaborative inference in discourse processing in which the tool or instrument that is typically used to perform a task is inferred from the text

Question 304

Describe Singer (1979) study on instrumental inference

Answer 304

• Singer compared reading times for different sequences such as the following:
  S1) The boy cleared the snow with a shovel. The shovel was heavy.
  S2) The boy cleared the snow from the stairs. The shovel was heavy.
• Singer reasoned that if participants were engaging in elaborative inference in S2, they should infer that the shovel was used even though it’s not said explicitly as it is in S1
• In that case, no time should be spent in backward inference when encountering the word shovel in the second sentence of each sequence
• If they didn’t engage in such elaborative inference, the reading time should be longer for S2 than S1
• He found that the latter to be the case: S2 took longer than S1 and concluded that elaborative rehearsal does not take place during online reading

Question 305

Describe O’Brien et al (1988) study on elaborative inference

Answer 305

• They presented the following sequences:
  S1: Gus loved to play games that allowed him to spend time outside. The leisurely pace made this particular sport his favorite. Playing golf was something he never got tired of doing.
  S2: Gus loved to play games that allowed him to spend time outside. His dream of a hole-in-one made this particular sport his favorite. Playing golf was something he never got tired of doing.
• They found that S1 took longer than S2
• On the one hand, both sequences contain an ambiguous phrase “this particular sport” that could be resolved by backwards inference from the word golf in the second sentence
• However, because S2 contained the phrase “his dream of a hole-in-one,” participants engaged in sufficient elaborative inference to already know that the phrase “this particular sport” referred to golf before they encountered the word in the final sentence
• With enough context, people do engage in online elaborative inference

Question 306

What’s the field of neurolinguistics?

Answer 306

• A branch of linguistics concerned with the relationship between linguistic behavior and the structures of the brain
• Devoted to understanding the neural underpinnings of language

Question 307

What’s the arcuate fasciculus

Answer 307

• A band of fibers in the brain that connect Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas
• Recent advance in relation to these 2 areas
• These connections are nearly absent in many mammals and much less pronounced in non-human primates, suggesting that they may be particularly important in our unique linguistic capabilities

Question 308

What’s linguistic relativity?

Answer 308

• The theoretical perspective that holds that the language someone speaks affects other areas of cognition
• Relativists believe that a culture will influence how you interpret information relative to your culture
• Ex: the specific language that we speak determines the kinds of thoughts we can have and even our basic perception of the world
• This theory is often attributed to 2 linguists: Edward Sapir and his student, Benjamin Lee Whorf
• Sometimes called the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

Question 309

What’s linguistic universalism?

Answer 309

• The theoretical perspective that holds that the language one speaks doesn’t affect other areas of cognition
• Linguistic universalists believe that differences among languages are fairly superficial and that they all ultimately express the same basic ideas, although sometimes quite differently

Question 310

What’s the turing test?

Answer 310

• A test proposed by Alan Turing to determine whether a machine can “think” based on fooling a human conversing with the machine that it’s another human
• The ability to converse intelligently is the basis of the well-known Turing test, proposed by Alan Turing as a litmus test of true artificial intelligence
• In the test, a human judge converses with a computer and a human
• If the judge can’t tell which is the true human, the machine is considered intelligent

Question 311

What’s Anoetic Consciousness?

Answer 311

• Implicit Memory
• No awareness or personal engagement

Question 312

What’s Noetic Consciousness?

Answer 312

• Semantic Memory
• Awareness but no personal engagement
• Not mentally time travelling

Question 313

What’s Autonoetic Consciousness?

Answer 313

• Episodic Memory
• Awareness AND personal engagement
• Mental time travel
• Self-reflective in nature

Question 314

How could we interpret that the sentence “wrap poison bottles in sandpaper and fasten with scotch tape or a rubber band. If there are children in the house, lock them in a small metal box” does not state that we should lock children in the metal box?

Answer 314

By relying not just on the text but on our preexisting knowledge that locking up poison in a metal box is a good idea, while locking up kids is not

Question 315

Describe the experiment by Bransford and Johnson (1972) on how knowledge can be incorporated with text to build a coherent representation of the meaning of discourse

Answer 315

• Participants were presented with a paragraph describing the process of doing laundry without explicitly stating that that’s what it is about and then were tested on their comprehension and recall
• They found that the simple hint of stating this was about doing laundry dramatically increased participants’ comprehension and memory scores
• This is because previous knowledge about doing laundry provides you with a great deal of information relevant to interpreting the text in way that makes sense and leads to meaningful, and memorable, information

Question 316

What are the 2 cortical regions of the brain long known to be involved in language?

Answer 316

Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas

Question 317

Where is Wernicke’s area located?

Answer 317

• In the temporal lobe, the first region of the cortex to receive auditory information after the thalamus

Question 318

Where is Broca’s area located?

Answer 318

In the frontal lobe of the cortex

Question 319

What’s the difference between Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas?

Answer 319

Broca’s area is essential for language production, while Wernicke’s area is critical for language comprehension

Question 320

What has the advance of neuroimaging discovered about Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas?

Answer 320

• It’s now clear that language comprehension doesn’t only involve Wernicke’s area but a much broader portion of the temporal lobe
• Imaging studies suggest that Broca’s area is somewhat involved in language comprehension as well, especially during processing of complex sentences but its exact role in the process remains unclear

Question 321

What has further research on Broca’s area discovered?

Answer 321

• The role of Broca’s area in language production isn’t as clear as once thought: damage to the region doesn’t always lead to severe speech deficits, and patients can have such deficits without damage to Broca’s area
• This lack of clarity around Broca’s area led to a scientific endeavor: the brains of 2 of Broca’s original patients with severe speech impairments were preserved by Broca in order to further study them. In 2007, several researchers took a new look at these brains using MRI. They found that there was damage not only to Broca’s area but other regions as well, confirming other studies showing that Broca’s area may not be the only factor in speech production

Question 322

What new research has developed on the idea that language is localized the left hemisphere?

Answer 322

• Language production appears to depend heavily on the left hemisphere
• Several studies, using both behavioral and imaging techniques, have suggested that the right hemisphere is involved in language as well, specifically in relation to the kind of higher-order processing required in discourse processing
• One obstacle to understanding the right hemisphere’s involvement in language is that its effects may be more subtle

Question 323

Describe Ferré et al. (2012) study on the role of the right hemisphere in language

Answer 323

• They found that a majority of patients with right-hemisphere damage due to stroke lesions do have language deficits
• These patients speak the same number of words, but the speech is less informative and coherent
• Showing that the right hemisphere may be involved in higher-level processes of the sort involved in discourse processing

Question 324

Describe Beeman et al (2000) study on causal inference

Answer 324

• They compared how long it took people to recognize the target word when the original sentence was presented to the right visual field (activating the left hemisphere) and the left visual field (activating the right hemisphere), and found a reduced naming time specifically for the left visual field
• This suggests the right hemisphere may specifically be involved in elaborative processing

Question 325

What’s a causal inference?

Answer 325

• An inference about a causal relationship between information in one sentence regarding information in another sentence
• A kind of elaborative inference in which a preceding sentence predicts a likely word in the following sentence
• Ex: the sentence “The space shuttle sat on the ground, waiting for the signal” might be expected to lead to an inference of the word launch

Question 326

Describe AbdulSabur et al. (2014) study on the role of the right hemisphere in language

Answer 326

• They used multiple imaging techniques to measure brain activity as people performed tasks requiring them to either understand or produce complex narratives
• They found pronounced activation in the right temporal lobe, specifically in the comprehension, but not the production task

Question 327

Why might the right hemisphere be involved in complex inferential processes?

Answer 327

• The right hemisphere is heavily involved in spatial reasoning, which would involve complex pattern processing
• Perhaps it plays a similar role in linguistic processing as well, computing global relations among sentences and paragraphs, rather than local, serial production of words themselves

Question 328

What are some examples of social behaviors that we need language to perform?

Answer 328

Establishing complex organizational structures and making elaborate plans for the future

Question 329

Explain how Whorf demonstrated linguistic relativity

Answer 329

• He generated some of the best-known examples of this phenomenon based on his study of indigenous peoples and their languages and, in particular, cases in which these languages supposedly contained several words for concepts which European languages had only one word
• A famous example of this is the Inuit language, which was claimed to have many more words for snow (dozens or even close to a hundred) than European languages
• Based on this, Whorf claimed that the Inuit could actually perceive different kinds of snow than Europeans
• His most developed research concerned the Hopi language
• He claimed that this language didn’t have words for units of time like days and weeks and that they, therefore, perceived time differently in such a way that influenced their behaviors

Question 330

What’s the criticism against linguistic relativity?

Answer 330

• Some consider it to have weak evidence or faulty assumptions
• Ex: the idea that the Inuit language has so many more words for snow has been proven to be untrue, and many have argued that differences in languages do not lead to fundamental differences in cognition

Question 331

Describe the evidence for linguistic relativity

Answer 331

• Several studies have found that when people speak a language that has distinct names for specific colors, they are better able to distinguish those colors than when they have the same name
• Ex: Russian has 2 words for blue: one for light blue, goluboy, and one for dark blue, siniy. This is comparable to the division of dark red and light red (i.e., pink) in English

Question 332

Describe Winawer and colleagues (2007) study on russian speakers and their perception of different shades of blue

Answer 332

• They tested to see whether Russians having 2 words for the colour blue might lead to Russian speakers seeing shades of blue that cross the color-name boundary differently than English speakers
• They presented participants with a color-matching task: on each trial, a single blue color patch was presented above 2 other patches and the participant had to decide which of the bottom 2 matched the top
• They found that Russian speakers performed the task 10% faster when the non-matching patch was in a different color category than the matching patch, compared with when both the match and the non-match were in the same color category
• This effect didn’t hold for English speakers
• This suggests that because Russian speakers had a different name for the colors, they actually perceive the colors as more different from one another

Question 333

What’s the field of natural language processing (NLP)?

Answer 333

• A subfield of artificial intelligence specifically concerned with machines understanding and producing language for purposes such as determining emotional tone, generating summaries, and even carrying on a conversation with a human
• NLP has seen dramatic advances in recent years by applying neural networks
• By learning from massive numbers of examples of real language currently available digitally, these models have achieved remarkable levels of performance in tasks such as translation, determining whether a given sentence is grammatical or paraphrasing/summarizing an article
• A widely used benchmark for measuring performance of NLP models, called GLUE (General Language Understanding Evaluation benchmark) was found to be outdated after only a few years of use because the tasks were proving too easy for the current state of the art
• The new benchmark is called superGLUE

Question 334

What does artificial intelligence still struggle with today with regards to language?

Answer 334

• To date, there are still no computers that can generate consistently human-like language in a conversational setting
• Some NLP researchers consider this a problem that will probably require more than just learning from examples, but instead will require the implementation of explicit language-like rules along the lines of more traditional AI approaches
• This sort of mirrors the views of linguistic nativists, like Chomsky, who believe that only learning language from examples will never yield satisfactory results
• Computers may need an “innate” universal grammar to succeed
• Perhaps more importantly, language is far more than syntax: it involves the semantic meaning of the words as well

Question 335

What’s sequence-to-sequence learning?

Answer 335

• A type of machine-learning task in which both the inputs and outputs are sequences, such as strings of words represented numerically
• Neural networks have been trained to take in a sequence of text as an input and produce a string of text as an output
• Ex: Open AI’s GPT-3 model has been trained on examples of writing prompts as inputs and full essays as outputs
• These models use a neural network architecture called a transformer and are able to learn which items in a long string, such as a text sequence, are critically related to each other in terms of accomplishing its input/output task
• The results of these models have been spectacular, with full length essays, ad copy, technical manuals, and so on. produced that rival human abilities in many cases
• More recently, this approach has even been applied to generating computer code based on a verbal description
• These models don’t ever learn (or at least aren’t taught) explicit rules of syntax, either for natural language or for computer programming
• Yet, they’re able to learn a function in a completely data-driven manner
• These contradict the claim that human-level language requires innate or learned grammatical rules or semantics, because maybe learning mappings between patterns is sufficient