Psychology Chapter 8: Cognition & Language (3 Stars) Flashcards
_______ argued that children learn language the same way they learn everything else: through imitation, reinforcement, and other established principles of operant conditioning
Behaviorist
B. F. Skinner
Two types of intelligence:
- Fluid intelligence (reason ______, abstractly)
- _______ intelligence (accumulated knowledge and verbal skills)
quickly
Crystallized
He proposes that infants are born with the innate ability to use language. According to this theory, human brains have evolved a language acquisition device that is innately capable of understanding a universal grammar common to all human languages.
language acquisition device (LAD)
Nativist Theory
Noam Chomsky’s Nativist Theory
All normally-developing humans will automatically learn language when exposed to it during a critical period that ends before puberty.
The LAD allows children, as their brains develop, to derive the rules of grammar quickly and effectively from the speech they hear every day.
Theory lies somewhere between these two; admits some innate ability and biological predispositions, but emphasizes social interactions and cognitive development as the most important factors (as expected from a symbolic ’interactionist’theory).
Lev Vygotsky’s Interactionist Theory
________, the hypothesis that one’s language determines the nature of one’s thought.
linguistic relativity (aka Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis)
In particular, experimental evidence suggests that linguistic differences in categorization (e.g., color categories) can influence the categorical perception of the speakers of those languages
Fill in the missing items
______, located in the frontal Lobe of the brain, is linked to
speech production & language comprehension.
Works in conjunction with working memory to allow a person to use verbal expression and spoken words.
.
Broca’s area
Damage to Brocas area can result in productive aphasia (also known as Broca’s aphasia), or an inability to speak.
Patients with Broca’s can often still understand language, but they cannot speak fluently
Wernicke’s area, located in the ________ is the part of the brain involved in understanding written and spoken language.
cerebral cortex
Damage to this area results in receptive aphasia (also called Wernicke’s aphasia).
This type of aphasia manifests itself as a loss of comprehension, so sometimes while the patient can apparently still speak, their language is nonsensical and incomprehensible.
__________ refers to active efforts to discover what must be done to achieve a goal that is not readily attainable.
Problem solving
- Problems of _______. The person must discover the relations among the parts of the problem.
- Problems of arrangement. The person must _______ the parts in a way that satisfies some criterion.
- Problems of _________. The person must carry out a sequence of transformations in order to reach a specific goal.
inducing structure (ex. completion problems and the analogy problems)
arrange (ex. string problem)
transformation (ex. water jar problem)
Common obstacles to effective problem solving include a focus on irrelevant information, functional fixedness, ______, and imposition of unnecessary constraints
mental set
_____________—the tendency to perceive an item only in terms of its most common use.
functional fixedness
_________ exists when people persist in using problem-solving strategies that have worked in the past.
A mental set
______ occurs when people suddenly discover the correct solution to a problem after struggling with it for a while.
Insight
Types of problem-solving include _______ , algorithms, deductive reasoning (deriving conclusions from general rules), and inductive reasoning (deriving generalizations from evidence).
trial-and-error
_________ involves trying possible solutions sequentially and discarding those that are in error until one works
Trial and error
________ is a guiding principle or “rule of thumb” used in solving problems or making decisions.
heuristic
Forming Subgoals
Searching for Analogies
Changing the representation of the Problem
____________ occurs when new solutions surface for a previously unsolved problem after a period of not consciously thinking about the problem.
An incubation effect
_______ exist when an experimenter or decision-maker is unable to objectively evaluate information.
Biases
______ is a “gut feeling” regarding a particular decision.
Intuition
holistic cognitive style that focuses on context and relationships among elements, whereas people from Western cultures (America and Europe) exhibit _______ style that focuses on objects and their properties rather than context.
analytic cognitive style
__________ involves evaluating alternatives and making choices among them.
Decision making
___________ involves basing the estimated probability of an event on the ease with which relevant instances come to mind.
availability heuristic
The _______________ involves basing the estimated probability of an event on how similar it is to the typical prototype of that event.
representativeness heuristic
___________ reasoning starts from a set of general rules and draws conclusions from the information given.
Deductive (top-down)
Inductive (bottom-up) reasoning seeks to create a theory via __________
generalizations.
Using prototypical or stereotypical factors while ignoring actual numerical information is called the _______
base rate fallacy
__________ occurs when people estimate that the odds of two uncertain events happening together are greater than the odds of either event happening alone.
The conjunction fallacy
_________, or a tendency to erroneously interpret one’s decisions, knowledge, and beliefs as infallible.
overconfidence
_________ refers to the inability to reject a particular belief despite clear evidence to the contrary.
belief perseverence
_________ occurs when people estimate that the odds of two uncertain events happening together are greater than the odds of either event happening alone.
conjunction fallacy
