Psych 207 Quiz 3

Modules 7 - 9

Artifact concept

concept pertaining to manufactured or human-designed objects

Basic level of categories

a hypothesized type of concept thought to be at a psychological fundamental level of abstraction

Category

a grouping of items sharing one or more similarities

Classical view of concepts

• the idea that all examples or instances of a concept share fundamental characteristics or features

• assumes membership in a category is clear-cut, and necessary and sufficient features are listed mentally

Concept

• a mental representation of a category

• provides a list of characteristics

Exemplar view of concepts

the idea that a concept consists of mental representations of actual instances or examples

Family resemblance

a structure of categories in which each member shares different features with different members; Few, if any, features are shared by every single member of the category

Feature

a component, or part, of an object, event, or representation

Implicit learning

learning that occurs without explicit awareness of what has been learned

Knowledge-based view of concepts

the idea that concepts function in relation to their instances as a scientific theory does to data to supporting it

Natural-kind concept

concepts pertaining to naturally occurring substances

Nominal-kind concept

concepts pertaining to ideas or objects that have well-delimited definitions

Nonanalytic concept formation

cognitive processes that implicitly acquire knowledge of a complex structure during the memorization of examples

Prototype

an abstract representation of an idealized member of a class of objects or events

Prototype view of concepts

the idea that all concepts are organized around idealized mental representations of examples

Psychological essentialism

the idea that people possess implicit theories about fundamental characteristics that all instances of a concept contain or embody

Schemata

frameworks for organizing and representing knowledge that contains roles, variables, and fixed parts

Schemata/scripts view of concepts

• the idea that all concepts are schemata

• assumes that information is abstracted across instances and stored about actual instances

Subordinate level of categories

a hypothesized type of concept thought to make fewer distinctions than does a basic level concept

Superordinate level of categories

a level of categorization broader than the basic level, including exemplars that can be quite dissimilar from one another

Rosch (1973); Rosch and Mervis (1975)

asked participants to list attributes "common to and characteristics of" objects (ex. Chair, car, orange, shirt, gun, peas) from six different superordinate categories (ex. Furniture, vehicle, fruit, clothing, weapon, vegetable); researchers computed the number of attributes commonly listed for all basic-level terms belonging to a superordinate category  

• More prototypical items (ex. Chair and sofa for furniture) had more furniture attributes than not prototypical items (ex. Clock or telephone) 

• Very few (0 or 1) attributes in any of the six superordinate categories were true of all 20 items for that category (ex. Attributes true of all fruits)  

McCloskey and Glucksberg (1978); Rosch (1973); Smith et al.

asked participants to list instances of a concept (ex. Birds) 

• People were more likely to list typical than atypical instances  

  • Classical view implies that all members of a concept are equal (disproves this theory)  

Mervis, Catlin, and Rosch (1976) 

• In semantic priming studies, highly typical instances often led to better priming  

  • Classical view implies that all members of a concept are equal (disproves this theory)  

McCloskey and Glucksberg (1978)

gave participants a list of items and asked them to judge whether the item belonged to certain categories (ex. "Does 'chair' belong to the category 'furniture'?")  

• Participants disagreed on atypical instances of furniture (ex. Bookends)  

  • Argued strongly against the classical assumption that categories have clearly defined boundaries  

  • Category membership is "graded" and boundaries between categories are "fuzzy" 

• Most people cannot generate lists of features that are individually necessary and collectively sufficient to specify membership in a category  

 

Armstrong, Gleitman, and Gleitman (1983)

• asked participants to rate the typicality of instances of both natural concepts (ex. Vehicle or fruit) and of well defined concepts (ex. Even number, female, geometric figure)  

• Participants rated the typicality of well-defined categories (ex. 3 is a more typical odd number than 57)

• Participants agreed that well-defined categories made little sense to talk about degree of membership in that category   

Conservative focusing 

• A strategy from Bruner’s experiment in 1956

• Participants found a card that illustrated the concept ("focus" card), then choose to test other cards that varied from it in only one aspect 

  • If any of these cards was also a member of the category, then the participant could logically eliminate the changed attribute as being relevant to the concept 

• Efficient 

• Relatively easy  

Simultaneous scanning

• A strategy from Bruner’s experiment in 1956

• Participants used each card to test and rule out multiple hypotheses 

• Difficult to use 

• Demanding on working memory 

Successive scanning 

• A strategy from Bruner’s experiment in 1956

• Participants tested one hypothesis at a time  

• Less efficient 

• More cognitively manageable 

Seger, Poldrack, Prabhakaran, Zhao, Glover, and Gabrieli (200)

• presented participants with a categorization task where they required to sort abstract drawings by two fictional painters (Smith and Jones) into two groups according to the two unseen, but strongly related, prototypes.  

• During early trials, brain activation was limited to the frontal and parietal regions in the right hemisphere  

  • Early classification mainly involves the processing of the visual patterns of the stimuli without the application of any rules  

• As learning progresses, regions in the left hemisphere begin to be recruited, specifically in the left parietal lobe and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex  

  • The shift to the left hemisphere processing may be the result of the formulation, and application of abstract rules  

Reber (1967, 1976) Study

• Participants memorized letter strings based on an unnoticed grammatical structure. Those who followed the grammar made fewer errors than those memorizing random strings. Warning about these rules decreased performance; memorizing examples proved more effective, as guessing the structure often led to incorrect assumptions.

• People are better off memorizing exemplars than trying to figure out what the structure is, primarily because participants who try to guess the structure often invent incorrect rules 

• People implicitly abstract the rules and apply this rule to new instances  

  • Contra-argued that learning is based on the abstract similarity between new stimuli and specific training stimuli  

Brooks (1978) Study

Participants learned to associate hieroglyphic strings with English words. When later given new strings, they answered questions based on similarity to previous examples but could not identify specific symbols used for their responses.

Barton and Komatsu (1989)

• presented participants with five natural-kind concepts (ex. Goat, water, gold) and five artifacts (ex. TV, pencil, mirror). With each concept, they asked the participants  to imagine different transformations.  

• the formula H₂O; a mirror not made of glass) 

• With natural-kind terms, participants were most sensitive to molecular transformations 

• With artifact terms, participants were most sensitive to functional changes 

• All concepts are not treated equally, and, under at least some conditions, people use their knowledge about why instances of a category should be grouped together in their representations of the related concept  

Cognitively penetrable task

a task that is affected by a person's beliefs and expectations

Demand characteristic

a property of certain tasks such that an experimental subject's behaviour or responses are "cued" by the task itself

Dual-coding hypothesis

• Paivio's assertion that long-term memory can code information in two distinct ways,

  • verbally

  • visually

• that items coded both ways (eg, Pictures or concrete words) are more easily recalled than items coded in only one way (eg, Abstract words)

Experimenter expectancy effect

the influence on the performance of experimental participants generated by an experimenter's belief or hypotheses, which somehow get subtly transmitted to the participants

Heuristic

a rule of thumb, or shortcut method, used in thinking, reasoning, and/or decision-making

Imaginal scanning

a task in which a participant is asked to form a mental image and to scan over it from one point to another

Implicit encoding

a principle of imagery that holds mental imagery is used in retrieving information about physical properties of objects, or of physical relationships among objects, that may not have been explicitly encoded

Mediators

internal codes that connect the items to be remembered and the later overt responses

Mental rotation

a type of visual imagery task in which subjects are asked to form an image of a stimulus and then to imagine how it would look as it rotates around a horizontal or vertical axis

Method of loci

• a memorization method that requires the learner to visualize an ordered series of physical locations as mnemonic cues for a list of information

• Lawrence (1968) --> college students trained in using the method of loci could recall up to 38 of 40 words after once presentation  

Mnemonics

strategies to facilitate retention and later retrieval of information

Pegword method

a memorization method that involves picturing the items with another set of ordered "cues" (nouns) and pegging them to the cues

Relational-organizational hypothesis

the idea that visual imagery aids memory by producing a greater number of associations

Space around the body

the area immediately around a person's body, in which the person can easily perceive and act on objects

Space of navigation

large spaces that people walk through, explore, or travel to and through

Space of the body

awareness of where the different parts of one's body are located at any given moment and what other objects different body parts are interacting with; used, along with internal sensations, to direct different parts of the body spatially

Spatial cognition

how people represent and navigate in and through space

Cognitive map

a mental depiction of some parts of our environment, presumably showing major landmarks and spatial relationships among them

Symbolic-distance effect

the time needed to compare two symbols varies inversely with the distance between their referents on the judged dimension

Tacit knowledge

people's underlying and implicit beliefs about a task or event

Visual image

a mental representation of a stimulus thought to share at least some properties with a pictorial or spatial depiction of the stimulus

Bower (1970b) - pair words

• if participants were given a pair of words (ex. Goat-pipe), participants who formed images of the words together (ex. A goat smoking a pipe) recalled almost twice as many paired associates as control participants who were not instructed to use imagery  

  • More effective if the two images interact than if they were placed next to each other  

  • The images should depict the to-be-remembered items interacting in some way with items at the various loci  

 

Bugelski, Kidd, and Segmen (1968)  

pegword method improves recall in paired-associates tasks as long as participants are given 4 seconds or more per item to form the images  

Paivio (1965)

• asked participants to learn one of four lists of noun pairs and recall

• Noun pairs: 

  1. CC - concrete object and concrete object (ex. Book-table) 

     • 11.41 correct responses (average) 

  2. CA - concrete object and abstract idea (ex. Chair-justice) 

     • 10.01 correct responses (average) 

  3. AC - abstract idea and concrete object (ex. Freedom-dress) 

     • 7.36 correct responses (average) 

  4. AA - abstract idea and abstract idea (ex. Beauty-truth) 

     • 6.05 correct responses (average) 

Bower (1970b)

• relational organization hypothesis

• Groups 

  1. Told to use "overt rote repetition" (rehearse aloud) 

  2. Told to construct two images that did not interact and were "separated in imaginal space" 

  3. Told to construct an interactive scene of the two words in a pair 

• Results: 

  • All participants recognized about 85% of the previously seen words 

  • Recall: 

    • Those who used rote memorization recalled about 30% of the paired-associates 

    • Those who used noninteractive memory recalled about 27% of the paired-associates 

    • Those who formed interacting images recalled about 53% of the paired-associates  

  • It is not just imagery that helps memory, but rather the way in which imagery is used

Moyer (1973)  

• People were faster to respond when the two objects (ex. Animals) differed greatly

• symbolic-distance effect

Shepard and Metzler (1971) - showed participants perspective line drawings of three-dimensional objects. On each trial, participants would see two drawings.  

• Findings:

  • The amount of time it took participants to decide if the two drawings depicted the same object or a mirror-image reversal was directly proportional to the angle of rotation between the drawings  

  • The time it took participants to come to a decision was the same for rotations in the picture plane and in depth  

    • Participants were mentally rotating three-dimensional images, not just two-dimensional drawings  

Cooper and Shepard (1973)

• sometimes gave participants a drawing of the letter to be used on a trial, followed by a cue showing the orientation to which the test stimulus would be rotated, before test stimulus appeared.  

• Participants were able to mentally rotate their images either clockwise or counter-clockwise, depending on which direction led to a lesser angle  

Cooper (1975)

• presented participants with irregular polygons.

• reaction times increased linearly with the angle of rotation  

• The rate of rotation was the same for all the polygons, regardless of their complexity  

• Mental rotations, like physical rotations, are continuous in nature  

Kosslyn (1973)

• had participants study drawings of objects.

• Each object was elongated either vertically or horizontally so that each has three easily describable parts: two ends and a middle.

• After initial learning phase, participants were told to form an image of one of the drawings and then "look for" a particular part.

  • Some participants were told to focus first on one part of the image (ex. The top or left) and then to scan, looking for the designated part

• Results: 

  • The longer the distance from the designated end to the location of the part, the longer it took people to say whether the part they were looking for was in the drawing  

    • The visual image formed preserves many of the spatial characteristics of the drawing: parts of the drawing that are separated in space are also separated in the image 

  • Argued that perhaps the reaction times increased due to the number of items in the image that had to be scanned (not due to the distance in the image

Kosslyn, Ball, and Reiser (1978) / Pinker (1980)

• created a map of a fictional island, and had participants memorize the locations of seven objects shown on the map

• The reaction times to scan between objects were correlated with the distance between objects  

  • Images preserve spatial relations 

• similar results to _____ experiment when the stimulus was a three-dimensional array of objects (toys suspended inside an open box)  

• Images depict at least some spatial information, and people can retrieve this information from their images  

Tversky (1981)

• systematic errors in memory for maps. Asked three questions:

1. Which city is farther north, Quebec City or Vancouver? 

2. Which city is farther west, Halifax or Ottawa? 

3. Which city is farther east, Cranbrook or Grande Prairie? 

• Results: most participants made errors on questions A and B 

  • People use different heuristics in orientating and anchoring oddly shaped units 

  • people try to "line-up" things to make them more orderly  

  • These distortions (heuristics) are one way in which mental images are not like mental pictures

Chambers and Reisberg (1992)

• asked participants to form an image of the creature

• Some participants were told that the creature was a duck, others were told that it was a rabbit.

• Results:  

  • When participants thought that the creature they imagined was a duck, they were well above chance at detecting the difference between (A) and (B) (duck bill), but not the difference between (A) and (C) (rabbit mouth) 

  • When participants thought that the creature they imagined was a rabbit, they were well above chance at detecting the difference between (A) and (C) (rabbit mouth), but not the difference between (A) and (B) (duck bill) 

  • Participants paid more attention to the region that they took to be the creature's face and less to other regions  

  • People who form images of the same physical stimulus, but who give different construals or meanings to the stimulus, actually form different images 

Knauff and Johnson-Laird (2002) three-term series problem

• Example: 

  1. Tandy is less furry than Bussey 

  2. Eskie is less furry than Bussey  

  3. Which dog is furriest?  

• Results: 

  • Visual relations (ex. Cleaner-dirtier) slowed down performance relative to either control problems (ex. Better-worse) or visuospatial problem (ex. In back of - in front of) 

    • The mental effort devoted to constructing the visual images used up mental capacity that could have been solely focused on drawing a logical conclusion  

Perky (1910)

• had participants imagine that they were looking at an object (ex. A tomato, a banana, an orange, a leaf) while staring at a blank screen

• After they reported having formed the image, they were briefly distracted by one experimenter while another two experimenters operated an apparatus that projected faint pictures of the objects the participants were imagining 

  • Many of the participants were unable to distinguish between their own images and the faint pictures 

Farah (1985)

• asked participants to form an image of a letter (ex. H or T) and then very soon after, they were sometimes presented with one of these letters, but at a low level of contrast, making the letters very difficult to see 

• Results:

  • Those who imagined a letter first were more accurate at detecting the actual presented letter than they were at detecting another letter 

  • Imagery can "prime" the visual pathway used in detecting an actual stimulus  

    • Visual imagery is perceptual "anticipation" 

Kosslyn, Reiser, Farah, and Fliegel (1983)

• asked participants to form images of pictures that differed in amount of detail 

• it took participants about 1.33x as long to form an image of the detailed pictures as it did other participants to form images of outline drawings  

Kosslyn et al.

• Participants first read a description, then saw the corresponding figure, and then covered it up and formed a visual image of the figure.  

Results:

• People given the description with more parts ("five squares in the shape of a cross") took longer to form the image than people with the simpler description ("two overlapping rectangles"), even though the physical pattern was the same  

  • The greater the complexity of the conceived structure of the object, the longer it takes to assemble an image of it 

Intons-Peterson (1983)

• used four undergraduate experimenters who were unfamiliar with the imagery literature. Some participants were "primed" by either seeing or imagining a stimulus before each trial; participants in a control condition received no primes.

• The results mirrored the experimenter's beliefs  

  • Despite the fact that all stimuli was presented by microcomputers and experimenters were not in the same room as participants, except initially when they read the instructions 

• Similar results with in imaginal scanning experiments 

• Participants in imagery experiments were sensitive to subtle, unintentional cues given by experimenters, including slight differences in intonation or pauses when reading instructions  

• Imagery research, by virtue of the subjective nature of the phenomenon, may be especially vulnerable to demand characteristics and experimenter expectations   

Images seem more easily distorted by the viewer's interpretations than are pictures or photographs (experiements)

• Carmichael, Hogan, and Walter (1932) presented participants with patterns, with one of two labels  

  • Participants later reproductions of the patterns (presumably based on imagery) were distorted in accordance with the label initially provided, as shown in the figure 

• Nickerson and Adams (1979) 

  • People make errors when trying to reproduce their images of familiar objects (ex. Recreating a toonie)  

Kosslyn (1976)

• tested the association strength between animals and their physical attributes  

• When people did not use imagery, they were faster to verify that cats had claws (high association value, small visual part of a cat) 

• When people used imagery, they were faster to verify that cats had a head (low association value, large visual part of a cat) 

  • Propositional theory would predict that the higher the association value, the more propositions relating the two items, the faster the verification time (proved wrong for visual imagery by this study) 

O'Craven and Kanwisher (2000)  

• When participants formed images of faces, the fusiform face area of the brain was activated 

• When participants formed a mental image of a place, the parohippocampal place area of the brain was activated 

Fusiform face area

an area of the brain that becomes activated when subjects view photographs of faces 

Parohippocampal place area

an area of the brain that becomes activated when subjects view photographs of complex scenes  

Tversky (2005)  

• The way people think about space depends on which kind of space is under consideration. Each kind of space seems to have different attributes and organization 

• Kinds of space: 

  • Space of the body 

  • Space around the body  

  • Space of navigation

Aphasia

a disorder of language, thought to have neurological causes, in which either language production, language reception, or both, are disrupted

Broca's aphasia (expressive aphasia / motor aphasia)

an organic disorder of aphasia with symptoms including difficulty speaking, using grammar, and finding appropriate words

Curare derivative

a widely used paralyzing agent during medical and surgical procedures

Grammar

a system of rules that produces well-formed, or "legal" entities

Gricean maxims of cooperative conversation

pragmatic rules of conversation, including moderation of quantity, quality, relevance, and clarity

Informationally encapsulated process

a process with the property of informational encapsulation ("the floor is made out of floor")

Lateralization

specialization of function of the two cerebral hemispheres

Lexical ambiguity

the idea that some words have different meanings

Lexical decision task

a task in which an experimental subject is presented with letter strings and asked to judge, as quickly as possible, if the strings form words

Linguistic competence

underlying knowledge that allows a cognitive processor to engage in a particular cognitive activity involving language, independent of behaviour expressing that knowledge

Linguistic performance

the behaviour or responses actually produced by a cognitive processor engaged in a particular cognitive activity involving language

Manner of articulation

the mechanics of how the airflow is obstructed, creating a particular sound

Modularity hypothesis

Fodor's proposal that some cognitive processes, in particular language and perception, operate on only certain kinds of inputs and operate independently of the beliefs and other information available to the cognitive processor or other cognitive processes

Morpheme

the smallest meaningful unit of language

Morphology

the study of the meaningful units of language (words)

Parsing

analyzing (a sentence) into its parts and describe their syntactic roles

Phoneme

the smallest unit of sound that makes a meaningful difference in a given language

Phoneme restoration effect

a perceptual phenomenon where under certain conditions, sounds actually missing from a speech signal can be restored by the brain and may appear to be heard

Phonetics

the study of speech sounds

Phonological rules

rules that govern the ways in which phonemes can be combined

Phonology

the study of the ways in which speech sounds are combined and altered in language

Phrase structure rules

rules that describe the ways in which certain symbols (phrases) can be rewritten as other symbols

Place of articulation

the place where the obstruction of airflow occurs, creating a particular sound