Quiz 4 PSYC 311

Levels of Categories

superordinate - tool, basic - screwdriver, subordinate - phillips screwdriver

Defining features

Necessary to the meaning of the concept

Characteristic features

Not necessary to the meaning of the concept, but describe the concept in typical terms

Development of characteristic features

Children witch from focusing on characteristic to realization of defining features as critical to an object - generally occurs sometime in elementary school

Stereotypes

• Concepts acquired through social channels

• often include emotional or evaluative dimension

• Reliance on them can lead to bias and prejudice

Outgroup homogeneity effect

People within the “in” group believe their group is quite varied while “out” groups are quite homogenous

Jane Elliot’s Experiment

• Separated groups of people based on eye color

• Brown - superior, smarter, more christian, etc. while blue opposite

• Brown-eyed people began to act superior

Pigeon experiment

A pigeon pecks rapidlyat a small photograph containing trees. When scene changes to a treeless street, it stops pecking. Resumes once trees come back

Importance of pigeon experiment

Demonstrates that pigeons possess an ability that transcends discrimination of simple stimulus dimensions such as wavelength. Suggests that pigeon’s classification behavior is mediated by abstract, or conceptual, rules and therefore resembles the cognitive solution accomplished by humans.

Exemplar model for categorization

Sets of stimuli are unified, not by a rule, a common feature, or an abstract representation, but by a common psychologically significant consequence

Feature learning model for categorization

Attend to the fixed property of a stimulus, which are the most primitive or the lowest building blocks of object recognition and categorization

Prototype matching for categorization

Categorization is accomplished by the acquisition of a prototypical representation of a category via a form of abstraction process

Characteristics of prototypes

1. Are supplied of a category, “this is a chair”

2. Serve as reference points “it’s like a chair…”

3. Are judged more quickly after priming

Family resemblance

No single attribute is found in all examples of a concept, but each example has at least one attribute n common with one other example of the concepts

Grammar

Sum of knowledge a person has about the structure of his/her own language

Discourse

Coherent group of written or spoken sentences

Propositions

Assertions made in sentence clauses (noun phrases, verb phrases)

Syntax

Specified relations made between types of words in a sentence (e.g., nouns and verbs)

Lexicon

The vocabulary of a person, language, or branch of knowlege P

Phrase structure tree

Standard way of representing the syntax of a sentence

Motor area

For actual production, ventral portion of the motor strip in M1

Broca’s Area

Speech production

Auditory perception area

Ventral and posterior to Broca’s area

Wernicke’s area

Speech comprehension

Angular gyrus

Organize language and thoughts V

Visual cortext

Perception of mouth movement

Key brain areas for language

What does the McGurk effect reveal?

• it is a perceptual phenomenon, revealing an interaction between hearing and vision in speech perception

• Speech perception is multimodal

McGurk effect inverted

• Bad lip reading - we see the mouth as saying something other than what is actually said

• Why? we speak rather fast and it’s not as easy to parse the sounds visually as when we parse the sounds

Thomas Demand - Rain

We see what we think is rain and audio complementing, but it is really wrappers falling onto a surface and bacong frying

Ambiguity

Property of language that permits more than one interpretation of a sound, word, phrase, or sentence

Solving ambiguity

Occurs via integration of bottom-up and top-down information (surrounding letters, sentences - perceptually based info// attention, memory)

Stage of language production

1. Mesage- speaker formulates the message to be conveyed

2. Grammatical encoding - choosing words to convey the message, developing syntactic structure of the sentence to be uttered

3. Phonological encoding - phonological representation of the utterance is developed

4. Articulation - message is articulated

Tip of Tongue phenomenon

The person can think of the word but cannot access its pronunciation

Language and colors

Language influences how we categorize, discriminate, and remember colors. Although people may possess similar basic visual capacities, the linguistic categories available to them can influence how they organize and remember perceptual experiences

Sapid-Whorf Hypothesis

Language influences cognition rather than strictly determining what people can perceive.

Brain activation while swearing

1. Right hemisphere, activates more to negative than the left side

2. Basal Ganglia, active during swearing production

3. Amygdala, active during swearing perception

Five different types of words that are taboo

1. The supernatural, invokes awe or fear

2. Body effluvia/organs, invokes disgust

3. Death/disease, invokes dread

4. Sexuality, invokes revulsion

5. Disfavored groups, invokes hatred, contempt

Five reasons we use taboo words

1. Dysphemism - to force the listener to think about how awful something is, and the time for politeness has passed

2. Abusive swearing - in order to invoke intimidation or humiliation

3. Idiomatic swearing - use words that hit the emotional buttons

4. Emphatic swearing - in order to emphasize

5. Cathartic swearing use of words to release tension; this may be a learned response

6. Alerting people that this is a casual/ safe place

Gentle genius of bonobos TED talk

• Bonobos in human scenarios act like how humans would

• Blade-like tools very similar to early man

• was able to draw lexigrams that she learned to communicate

Savage-Rumbaugh Bonobo work

• Bipedal locomotion allows for joint attention (episode of shared attention that is not usually linguistic)

• Children who engage in joint attn. speak sooner

• Using language w bonobos, not just to “teach” them language

  • Meeting the bonobo halfway

  • In babies — crying and whining were fount to be replaced w/ signing

Reaction time and interference paradigm

• Generate an image and complete a stimulus transformation - time needed to do so indicated spatial properties of the mental stimulus

• Interference paradigm

  • Active interference (complete 2 tasks things at once)

  • Passive interference (at-rest postures while imagining)

Measuring Contents of mind - brain imaging

Functional activation of brain as a result of contents of mind

Measuring contents of mind - subjective report, introspection

Report on what you see in your mind’s eye; contemplation of one’s own thoughts, desires, opinions

Experiment - participants instructed to imagine object in specific size

Smaller objects tend to be activating lower parts of visual cortex

The role of area 17

Used TMS to invoke a temporary lesion - people had trouble visualizing things

Blind people while reading braille

Activation of visual cortex despite blind

Oliver sacks

• For a year John Hull could imagine few things visually after losing eyesight, but then that disappeared

• other blind people had different experiences

Esrec Armagon - The blind painter

• Draws very well

• Plans painting in his head, and recreates on paper

  • Often feels objects and can redraw them

  • Has visual cortex activation

Neglect patient

Information all stored, but they only give you half the information (omit info on neglected side)

Figure 11.10

Greater activation of visual cortex

Eidetic imagery

Vastly more detailed than ordinary imagery - kind of like photographic memory

Top down vs. bottom up

Neutral images- could be one thing or another, when participants asked to recall, they draw the thing they identified image as instead of the neutral image

Daniel Kish - echolocation

• Bilateral retinal blastoma

• Flash sonar - clicks tongue to "see” the space around him

  • actually activates visual cortex and creates images in his mind