Isabella psych 3

Well-defined problem

Clear starting point and a fully specified goal (e.g., puzzles)

Ill-defined problem

Starting point and goal cannot be fully specified (e.g., choosing a career)

What does solving problems depend on?

How you represent the problem in your mind and changing this representation to find a solution (think example with the triangle within the circle)

Insight

Sudden knowledge of the solution to a problem (e.g., "Aha!")

What was Metcalfe and Wiebe's experiment and what did it show?

Participants solved insight and noninsight problems. They made "warmth" ratings (from 1-7) every 15 seconds, where warmer (closer to 7) \= feeling close to solution and cooler (closer to 1) \= feeling far from a solution. Warmth steadily increases with noninsight problems. There is a leap of warmth with insight problems

What is the candle problem?

A test conducted by Duncker that challenges functional fixedness

Where do difficulties with the candle problem come from?

Only thinking about the matchbox in its usual function (i.e., holding the matches)

Functional fixedness

The tendency to think of things only in terms of their usual functions; an impediment to problem solving

What were the differences between the two groups in Duncker's candle study? What were the results?

For one group, the matches were inside the box. For the other group, the matches were laid on the table outside of the box. The group that saw the empty box were better at problem solving, suggesting that when the box was released from its usual function, people were less functionally fixated

What groups are relatively immune to functional fixedness?

Children under 5, pop culture heroes

What was Luchins water jar problem, and what did he find?

Luchins presented 3 jars of different capacities and told people to use the jugs to measure out a specific amount of water. For all problems, the solution was the same. Desired quantity \= B - A - 2C. However, there were simpler solutions to questions 7 and 8. Group 1 solved the water jug problem in order (1-8). Group 2 did problems 7 and 8 first. A mental set was induced in group 1, which got in the way of restructuring the pouring sequence. Group 2 was much more likely to use the shorter solution

Mental set

Becoming stuck in a specific problem-solving strategy

What do word problems show?

Problem solving is not only about insight and changing your representation. Instead, many problems involve searching through a set of solutions. We cannot always search through entire set of solutions. So, people often rely on heuristics to help them find solutions quicker/easier

Heuristic

Mental shortcut, quick and easy but do not guarantee a correct solution (e.g., rounding)

Algorithm

A procedure that will always yield the solution to a problem if it is followed exactly (e.g., math equation)

What is the Tower of Hanoi problem?

The objective of the Tower of Hanoi problem is to move the stack of disks from the initial rod to another rod. The rules: a disk cannot be placed on top of a smaller disk. No disk can be placed on top of the smaller disk.

What heuristic is used to solve the Tower of Hanoi problem?

The means-ends heuristic

Means-ends analysis

Heuristic of forming subgoals. We create subgoals even if we don't realize it

Working backwords

Starting at the goal and moving backwards to the starting point (e.g., mazes)

Decision making

Choosing from among a set of alternatives. Problem solving involves coming up with a solution instead of choosing

What are some examples of flawed decision making?

Biased decisions, relying on heuristics that don't lead to better decisions

Framing effect

Decisions are biased by the way the decision is presented (e.g., in Kahneman's "disease problem", most people avoid risk when the outcome is positive and seek risk when the outcome is negative)

What did Stewart look at and what did he find?

Stewart looked at minimum payment information on credit card statements and monthly payment. He found that there is a positive correlation between minimum payment and amount paid (i.e., smaller minimum payment \= smaller amount paid)

What was Watson's experiment and what did it show?

Watson gave participants a series of numbers (i.e., 2, 4, 6). The series conformed to a simple rule, and participants had to determine what the rule was by coming up with their own series of numbers. Watson found that most people made guesses like "14, 16, 18" or "182, 184, 186", suggesting that the participants believed the rule was that numbers increase by 2. However, these sequences are not the best way of testing the rule, they represent a confirmation bias

Confirmation bias

Focus on information that confirms your existing beliefs. Seeking disconfirming evidence can lead to a better outcome

What was Darley and Gross's experiment and what did it show?

Participants were divided into two groups. Each group was shown a video of a girl, Hanna, playing. Group 1 was shown a video of Hanna was playing in a "rich" environment. Group 2 was shown a video of Hanna playing in a "poor" environment. Both groups then watched the same video Hanna taking an intelligence test. The participants were asked to rate Hanna's performance on the intelligence test. Participants in the "rich" group rated Hannah's performance above grade average, whereas the "poor" group rated her performance below grade average, in spite of watching the same ambiguous video. Both groups cited evidence from the ability test to support their conclusions

Representative heuristic

Basing the probability of an event on a pattern of experiences or beliefs about that event (e.g., baby birth order)

Gambler's fallacy

Mistaken belief that if a random event did not occur recently, it becomes more likely (e.g., flipping a coin and receiving heads 10 times in a row)

Conjunction error

Wrong belief that two or more events are more likely than one

Which one of Kahneman's experiments investigated conjunction error?

Linda's experiment: Kahneman gave participants a short passage about a woman named Linda where she was described as a philosophy student who is deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations. He then gave participants two statements and asked them which one they thought was more likely: 1) She is a bank teller 2) She is a bank teller and active in the feminist movement. 85% of people ranked statement two as more likely

Where does the Linda problem error come from?

Linda seems representative (based on stereotypes) of "feminist bank tellers", but just becomes something is more representative does not make it more likely

Availabilty heuristic

Easily remembered examples are judged to be more probable than harder to remember examples (e.g., there are more words with k as the third letter than words that begin with k)

What is our perception of risk distorted by?

Availability

What was Lichtenstein's experiment and what did it show?

Lichtenstein asked participants which cause of death was more likely: tornado, fireworks, drowning, and asthma. 58%thought more deaths from tornadoes than asthma, which is not at all true. This shows that people overestimate causes of death that are in the media, because these examples become available to them

Why are people bad decision-makers?

Girgerenzer's "fast and frugal" hypothesis: heuristics allow quick decisions with minimal energy, which would have been advantageous for early ancestors when time and energy were limited resources

What kind of world do we live in?

A probabilistic world: uncertain but lawful

What explains the findings of Wainer's experiment that cancer rates are both the lowest and highest in rural US counties (not the same ones)?

Insensitivity to sample size: there are fewer people in small counties; unlikely things can happen with small samples

What explains the mistaken belief that, in the green and blue cab problem, the probability that the cab involved in the crime was blue is 80%?

Base rate neglect

Base rate neglect

Bias to ignore or underestimate the effect of initial probabilities

Regression to the mean

Tendency for extremely high or low scores to be followed by scores that are closer to the mean (e.g., batting averages in 1998 and 1999)

Non-regressive judgement

Ascribing "cause" to probabilistic events that are more easily explained by regression to the mean

What are some everyday examples of regression to the mean?

Sophomore slump, Sports Illustrated Cover Jinx, "the student did exceptionally poorly last semester so I punished him and he did much better this semester. Therefore punishment is effective in improving students' grades"

How does regression to the mean impact drug trials?

Showing that experimental group got better over time is not real proof the drug works. Experimenters must show that experimental group improved to levels better than the control group

What was the issue with the UK's Committee on Safety of Medicines' warning, "study found that new contraceptive pills increase the risk of potentially life-threatening blood clots by 100%"

They reported the relative increase, which says nothing about the absolute increase

Relative vs absolute risk

Absolute risks are typically small numbers while the corresponding relative changes tend to look big

What were the results of he UK's Committee on Safety of Medicines' warning?

Increase in abortion (costing National Health Service $70 million) and also increased pregnancy

What are some theories about how infants acquire language through learning mechanisms?

Operant conditioning (e.g., mom gives milk as positive reinforcement for saying "milk") or observational learning (e.g., infant imitates speech)

What are the challenges to the "nurture" view of language?

Learning does not account for generativity and infants are aware of syntax

Generativity

The knowledge of rules + words \= the ability to create a sentence that has never been spoken before

Syntax

Rules of language

What do nativists ("nature") believe?

Infants "come into the world with some basic knowledge of how language works"

When do children begin to babble?

6-18 months

When do children begin to use words?

10-13 months

When do children have a 50 word vocabulary, and what are the types of words they know?

18 months, mostly words for objects/nouns

Vocabulary spurt

A phenomenon occurring around 18 months of age when the pace of word learning quickens dramatically

How many words do children know by grade 1?

10,000

How many words do children know by grade 5?

40,000

What are the errors of vocabulary spurt?

Overextension and underextension

Overextension

Using a word to describe a wider set of objects or actions than it is meant to (e.g., using "ball" for anything round)

Underextension

Using a word to describe a narrower set of objects than it is meant to (e.g., using "dog" only for the child's own dog)

When do children start combining words?

Near the end of age 2

Telegraphic speech

Less critical words omitted (e.g., "give cupcake")

Overregularization

Grammatical rules incorrectly generalized to irregular causes where they don't apply (e.g., "The girl goed home", "I hitted the ball")

What is metalinguistic awareness?

Metalinguistics is the ability to reflect on the nature of language (e.g., understand that you can stay things in different ways)

What are the defining factors of middle childhood?

Metalinguistics, using "self talk", sensitivity to extralinguistic information

Extralinguistic information

Components of language other than the literal meaning of the words

Pragmatics

Set of rules concerning social rules of language, includes etiquette

What is the most important principle of pragmatics?

Cooperative principle

Cooperative principle

Assuming that your conversational partner is working with you to try to get a meaning across truthfully and clearly

Does thinking depend on language?

Strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis called linguistic determinism says that it does

What re the arguments against linguistic determinism?

Babies and animals are capable of thought without language (e.g., raven problem solving video), some types of thinking don't require words (e.g., rotation task), we don't remember words, just meaning, and if thought depends on language, then what did our ancestors do before language - not think?

What did Eleanor Rosch present evidence against and how did she do it?

Linguistic determinism - Rosch investigated language in English speakers, who have 11 words to describe colour, and Dani, who only have 2. Rosch's experiments showed that Dani were sensitive to focal colours without names for them (i.e., thoughts about colour are independent of lanuage)

What can effect episodic memory?

Framing - how a question or statement is worded

What was Loftus and Palmer's experiment and what did it show?

Loftus and Palmer showed participants videos of car accidents and asked "about how fast were the cards going when they smashed, bumped, hit, contacted with each other). Participants reported higher speeds when the question was asked with the words smashed and bumped than with hit or contacted

What affects judgments about probability?

Framing - how a question or statement is worded. For example, "Do you get headaches frequently? If so, how often" vs "Do you get headaches occasionally? If so, how often". Participants reported higher number of average headaches per week when they were asked the first way

What are the two main ways of thinking about where things are in space?

Egocentric perspective and allocentric perspective

Egocentric perspective

Position of an object, landmark, etc., is relative to me

Allocentric perspective

Position of an object, landmark, etc., is relative to another object or landmark

What was Brown and Levinson's experiment and what did it show?

Brown and Levinson presented Dutch (who use egocentric language) and Tenejapans (who use allocentric language) speakers with objects on a table. Then, people were rotated 180 degrees and told to position objects in the same way as before. Egocentric speakers placed the objects in the wrong (opposite) order, because they placed the objects relative to their own left and right as opposed to their objective position on the table

What is the key idea of the following quote by Kahneman, "At the end of the vacation, all pictures and videos will be destroyed. Furthermore, you will swallow a potion that will wipe out all of your memories of the vacation. How would this prospect affect your vacation plans?..."?

There are two parts to an experience: an experiencing and remembering self. We use our memories to make decisions

What was Kahneman et al.'s experiment and what did it show?

Ice water experiment - Participants put each of their hands in a bucket of ice water. One of the hands remained in the ice water for 60 seconds and the other remained in the ice water for 90 seconds. In the 90 second condition, for the last 30 seconds, the bucket was rigged to get very slightly warmer (1 degree). Kahneman then asked people, if they had to redo the experiment, which condition would they choose, the 60 second one or the 90 second one? 80% of people said that they would choose the longer, 90 second, condition. This is an irrational decision. This shows that we use our memories, sometimes to our detriment, to make decisions about the future - participants are bias by the one snapshot of the slightly warmer water that they overlook the longer duration

Three-memory model

Assumptions about the structure of memory. Three-memory stages are not anatomical structures in the brain, but rather functionally distinct types of memory

What are the components of the three-memory model?

Sensory memory, short-term memory, long-term memory

How does the three-memory model classify each memory store?

The three-memory model classifies each memory store according to span (how much information it can hold) and duration (how long it can hold that information)

Sensory memory

Stores a lot of information but for very brief periods due to constant updating. It briefly holds sensory information after the stimulation is over. It is rapidly and continuously being "refreshed" by new sensory information

Iconic memory

Visual sensory memory

Echoic memory

Auditory sensory memory

Whole report condition

A condition in iconic memory studies in which the task is to remember the entire letter display

Partial report condition

A condition in iconic memory studies in which the task is to remember only a randomly selected portion of the entire letter display

Why, in the whole report condition of Sterling's study, did participants recall an average of 4.5 of 12 letters?

There are two possibilities: participants only say on average 4.5 letters or participants saw all or most of the letters but sensory memory faded rapidly

What proved that sensory memory fading rapidly is the reason participants in Sterling's study only recalled an average of 4.5 of 12 letters?

In the partial report condition, average 3.3 of 4 letters in row recalled. Since position of cue was unknown, participants must have seen 82% of whole display, so the theory that participants only see on average 4.5 letters cannot be true

What is the only stage of the three-memory model where there is anything like raw unprocessed sensory material?

Sensory memory

What plays a major role in what we remember?

Ourselves

What is required for sensory information to enter STM from sensory memory?

In order for sensory information to enter STM from sensory memory, it must be attended

Attention

Involves selectively focusing on certain details of a stimulus and "filtering out" others

Short-term memory (STM)

Can store limited amounts of information for an indefinite amount of time. In order for information to stay in STM, it must be rehearsed. Without rehearsal, STM can only hold info for a few seconds

Rehearsal

The process of repetitively verbalizing or thinking about information

What was Brown and Peterson's study and what did it show?

Participants were shown a set of 3 letters and told to count backwards by 3's by 100. After about 10-15 seconds of being prevented from rehearsing, participants could not remember the sequence. This showed the importance of rehearsal in memory

Decay

Fading of memory over time

Interference

New information or confusion with other memories