Psyc 134: Knowledge, Visual Imagery, and Language

Flashcards for key vocabulary and concepts from the lecture notes.

Conceptual Knowledge

Knowledge that enables us to recognize objects and events and to make inferences about their properties.

Concepts

Categories of objects, events, and ideas (provides “rules” as to what is a category)

Categories

All possible examples of a given concept.

Categorization

The process of assigning something to a category.

Definitional Approach

Determine category membership based on whether an item meets the definition of the category.

Prototype Approach

Determine category membership by comparing the item to a prototype that resembles the category.

Family Resemblance

Items in a category resemble one another in a number of ways.

Prototype

Typical member of a category that has most of the characteristic features.

Typicality

How closely a category member resembles the category prototype.

Sentence verification technique

Read a statement and judge whether or not it is true

Exemplar Approach

Determine category membership by comparing the item to exemplars of the category.

Exemplar

Previously encountered member of a category.

Hierarchical organization

Larger, more general categories are divided into smaller, more specific categories

basic level

category members most often used to identify an object

Semantic Network Approach

Concepts are arranged in the mind as networks that connect related concepts.

Nodes

Category or concept within semantic networks.

Lines

connect related nodes

Spreading Activation

Activating' a node spreads to all connected concepts.

Lexical decision task

Participants indicate whether the stimuli are words or non-word

Cognitive Economy

Shared properties are stored just once at a higher-level node.

Connectionist Network

Concepts are represented as activity that is distributed across a network; also known as parallel distributed processing (PDP) models.

units, lines, and weights in a connectionist network

units: circles

lines: connects units

weights: strength of connections

output units

Receive input from hidden units

Hidden units

Receive input from input units

input units

Activated by stimulation in the environment

graceful degradation

performance disruption occurs gradually as part of the system or damaged

generalization of learning

training system to recognize properties of one concept provide provides information about related concepts

Visual Imagery

"Seeing" in the absence of a visual stimulus (like seeing our kitchen) , Not always visual

Spatial Representation

Different parts of an image correspond to specific locations in space.

Mental Scanning

We create mental images and then scan them in our mind.

Symbolic Distance Effect

We detect more details when we are closer to a stimulus.

Propositional Representation

Different parts of an image are represented by language or symbols.

Pegword Technique

"Hang" to-be-remembered words to "pegs" of concrete nouns that you use to create images.

Language

A system of communication using sounds or symbols that enable us to express our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences.

Semantics

Meaning of a word, sentence, or passage.

Syntax

Rules that determine how words combine into sentences.

Phonemes

Smallest unit of speech sounds.

Morphemes

Smallest meaningful unit of language.

words

compromised of one or more morphemes

sentences

A meaningful collection of words

Lexical Semantics

Meaning of words.

Lexicon

All of the words we know.

Word Frequency

How often words occur.

word frequency effect

we respond Faster words that occur more frequently, We fix it less to Words that occur more frequently

word pronunciation

how we say words is affected by speech speed, accents, and word slurring

speech segmentation

we perceive individual words even though there are often no silences between them

Mondegreens

mishear something, slip of the ear

Lexical Ambiguity

Words often have more than one meaning.

Lexical priming task

read a priming sentence, followed by a probe word as quickly as possible

Priming effect

respond faster to probe words that have the same or similar meaning to the priming sentence

Biased dominance

One meaning, occurs more often than others

Phrasal Semantics

Meaning of sentences.

Parsing

Mentally grouping the words into phrases to create meaning.

Garden Path Sentence

Sentences that begin by appearing to mean one thing, but end up meaning something else.

Garden path model of parsing

Listeners use heuristics (syntax based rules) to group words into phrases

Heuristics

Educated guesses, intuitive, judgments, or common sense used to solve problems quickly

late closure

Parser assumed each new word is part of the current phrase

Constraint based approach to parsing

Listeners use syntax along with other information (word meaning, context, memory load) to group words into phrases

Visual word paradigm

View were seen and follow instructions

Given-New Contract

Speaker should construct sentences that include given information (that the listener already knows) and new information (that the listener is hearing for the first time).

Common Ground

Knowledge and beliefs shared among conversation participants.

referential communication task

One person has to identify something, the reference, being described to them by someone else

Syntactic Coordination

Conversation participants coordinate their grammatical constructs.

Syntactic priming

Hearing a grammatical construction increases the change that you will use it too

Theory of Mind

Being able to understand what others feel, think, or believe.

nonverbal communication

Being able to interpret and react to the person’s gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice, and other cues to meaning