PSYC Exam (Weeks 12-15) Flashcards
What is language and what is it used for?
ubiquitous tool, but its primary form of use is interpersonal communication
How can people share new information by using language?
levels of language use: lexicon, syntax, speech rate, and accent.
What is Audience design?
Constructing utterances to suit the audience’s knowledge.
What is Common Ground?
Information that is shared by people who engage in a conversation.
What is Linguistic intergroup bias?
People often use abstract language to describe positive aspects of their ingroup, while expressing negative aspects of their outgroups.
What is Ingroup?
Group to which a person belongs.
What is OutGroup?
Group to which a person does not belong.
What is Lexicon?
Words and expressions.
What is Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?
The hypothesis that the language that people use determines their thoughts.
What is Priming?
A stimulus presented to a person reminds him or her about other ideas associated with the stimulus.
What is Situation model?
A mental representation of an event, object, or situation is formed when understanding a linguistic description.
What is Social brain hypothesis?
The hypothesis that the human brain has evolved, so that humans can maintain larger ingroups.
What are Social networks?
Networks of social relationships among individuals through which information can travel.
What is a Syntax?
Rules by which words are strung together to form sentences.
What is Theory of Mind?
The human capacity to comprehend minds comprises concepts like agent and intentionality, as well as processes like goal detection, imitation, empathy, and perspective taking.
i.e Put yourself in someone else’s shoes
How do individuals diagnosed with autism differ in their processing of others’ minds.
- They struggle with the processing with theory of mind
- Lack automatic processing of people’s information
Domains of social life in which theory of mind is critical?
- Sharing experiences by expressing the event
- Learning the words of a language
- Teaching new actions or rules
- Figuring out our social standing by guessing what others think and feel about us.
- Collaborating involves signaling shared goals and understanding each other’s intentions to achieve the joint goal.
Describe and explain some of the many concepts and processes that comprise the human understanding of minds.
- Agents are moving objects that can act independently, with features like self-propulsion, eyes, and systematic reactions to interaction partner’s behavior.
- Goals are a result of agents seeking out, tracking, and physically contacting goal objects.
- Recognizing goals involves observing the predictable relationship between a particular agent pursuing a particular object across various circumstances.
Automatic empathy
A social perceiver unintentionally assumes another person’s internal state by mimicking their expressive behavior, thereby feeling the expressed emotion.
How do ordinary people explain unintentional and intentional behavior.
Intentionality is a complex concept, requiring the right beliefs and skill to perform intentional actions, even if unintentional, to achieve a goal.
False-belief test
An experimental procedure evaluates if a perceiver acknowledges another person’s false belief, which contradicts reality.
Visual perspective taking
Visual perspective taking involves perceiving something from another person’s spatial vantage point, while effortful mental state inference involves trying to infer thoughts, desires, and emotions.
Mimicry
Copying others’ behavior, usually without awareness.
i.e copying someones accent
Folk explanations of behavior
People typically explain others’ behaviors by attributing them to the beliefs and motives of an unobservable mind.
Mirror neurons
Monkey brains contain neurons that fire when the monkey performs an action and perceives another agent performing that action.
i.e monkey see monkey do
Joint attention
Two people attending to the same object and being aware that they both are attending to it.
Projection
A social perceiver’s assumption that the other person wants, knows, or feels the same as the perceiver wants, know, or feels.
Intentionality
The quality of an agent’s intentional behavior, based on skill, awareness, and intention, is determined by desire and relevant beliefs.
Simulation
The process of representing the other person’s mental state.
What is the problems with attempting to define categories.
- Not Everything can be place into one category
- They are fuzzy with unclear boundaries
What is Typicality?
The study examines the distinction in “goodness” between typical (prototype) and borderline category members.
What is Psychological essentialism?
The concept of category membership suggests that individuals within a specific category possess an unobserved attribute that leads to their belonging within the category.
What is an Exemplar?
An example in memory that is labeled as being in a particular category.
What is Basic-level category?
The neutral, preferred category for a given object, at an intermediate level of specificity.
What is a Category?
A set of entities that are equivalent in some way. Usually the items are similar to one another.
What is a Concept?
The mental representation of a category.
What is the prototype theory?
People have a summary representation of a category, represented by weighted features. This theory explains classification, where typical items have more features, making it easier to match them to the conceptual representation.
What is exemplar theory?
we see an object, we unconscious compare it to the exemplars n our memory and judge how similar it is to exemplars in different categories
What is the hierarchically organized categories
Superordinate- simple- mammal or fish
identify and describe the main areas of cognitive development
Understanding how children’s thinking changes so dramatically in just a few years is a fascinating challenge in studying cognitive development.
Major theories of cognitive development and what distinguishes them.
- Stage theories - focus on whether children progress through qualitatively different stages of development.
- Sociocultural theories - emphasize how other people and the attitudes, values, and beliefs of the surrounding culture influence children’s development.
- Information processing theories - examine the mental processes that produce thinking at any one time and the transition processes that lead to growth in that thinking.
How does nature and nurture work together to produce cognitive development?
Every aspect of development is produced by the interaction of genes and environment.
- Nature and nurture interact to produce cognitive development.
- The way nature and nurture work together can be seen in findings on visual development.
- Children’s genes lead to their eliciting different treatment from other people, which influences their cognitive development.
What is Sensorimotor Stage?
- Children’s thinking is largely realized through their perceptions of the world and their physical interactions.
- Their mental representations are very limited, as seen in Piaget’s object permanence task.
What is Piaget’s theory on Discontinuous and continuous development?
Theory that development occurs through a sequence of discontinuous stages: the sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational stages.
i.e likes continuous more than discontinous
What is Preoperational Stage?
Children can solve simple problems but tend to focus on a single dimension, even when solving problems would require considering multiple dimensions.
What is Concrete Operation Stage?
Children overcome this tendency to focus on a single dimension during this stage, but still cannot think in systematic scientific ways.
What is Formal Operations Stage?
- Children attain the reasoning power of mature adults, which allows them to solve a wide range of problems.
- This formal operations stage tends to occur without exposure to formal education in scientific reasoning.