PY344: Cognition Exam 2

How does the idea of linguistic relativity relate to whether we perceive sentences to be similar to one another?

Instead of considering sentences to be unlike because they tell about unlike facts, it posits that “Facts are unlike to speakers whose language background provides for unlike formation of them.”

According to Whorf, similarities and contrasts in original sentences, subsumed under symbolic formulas, are dependent on what?

The given language and that its properties are reflected as peculiarities of structure.

Polysyntactic languages are distinctive for a vocabulary capable of what?

Evocative recombination to produce novel meanings.

We recognize that a mechanistic way of thinking leads to challenges in science, but why is it hard to rid ourselves of this school of thought?

Mechanistic perceptions are a natural type of syntax to Indo-European languages.

What do the structural regularities of sentences imply, according to Whorf?

Laws are somewhere in the background, even though they are not as self-evident as they seem.

Whorf views language to be a superficial embroidery upon…

Deeper processes of consciousness necessary before any communication, signaling, or symbolism can occur.

What is contrastive linguistics?

A field of study plotting the outstanding differences among tongues on grammar, logic, and general analysis of experience.

Languages differ in how they build sentences, as well as how they…

Break down nature to secure the elements to put in these sentences.

English and similar tongues tend to think of the world as…

A collection of rather distinct objects and events corresponding to words.

Native languages without separate-object pictures show that…

We can have sentences that can’t be broken up into subjects and predicates.

Plain English has the ____ amount of unconscious assunption about nature.

Greatest

What is Gleitman and Newport’s underlying theory on language learning and acquisition?

Languages are not fully innate, but they are acquired as a process of both linguistic input and biological predispositions.

Do alterations in the environment over a very large range impact acquisition?

No, but learners’ maturation impacts its success and nature.

All human languages share what characteristics?

Organized in hierarchy of structures; have the wherewithal to express approximately the same meaning; children are prepared to learn only languages with these properties relatively effortlessly.

Describe early language development in children.

Begin with nouns and social words, then vocab growth into 2-word sentences, then considerable elaboration from 2-5 years old, reserving structurally determined positions for subjects and direct objects.

Mothers’ overall simplicity had what effect on children’s acquisition?

It did not predict rate of children’s acquisition; they developed in accordance to a maturation schedule seemingly indifferent to maternal variation.

Describe language-isolated deaf children’s early language development.

It occurs at much the same schedule as hearing children, but their gestural systems don’t advance anywhere near the complexity of natural languages.

In both content and form, properties of mind appear to do what for human languages?

Legislate the development and character of human languages.

In the first stages of learning a second language, adults are more ______, but after a few years, children become much more _____.

Efficient; fluent

After 30 years of use, how did ASL users differ depending on the age of first introduction?

Only those earliest exposed to ASL showed native fluency, with significant deficits occurring after age 12.

For every human language learner, they are isolated from what?

Much of the information needed to learn a language from mere exposure; the environment offers fragmentary and inconclusive clues.

According to Gleitman and Newport, the universality of language is one of the…

Central cognitive properties that makes us human.

According to Zwaan et al., perceptual symbols seem to better represent what compared to amodal propositions?

Building blocks of cognition.

What previous findings suggest for the perceptual symbol view?

The response time was longer for mismatches between implied and pictured orientation.

In the first experiment in Zwaan et al., response latency was faster when…

The sentence and picture matched.

When comprehending sentences in Zwaan et al., subjects seemed to represent what?

The implied shape of the objects, making responses to pictures slower when it mismatched the implied shape.

In Zwaan et al.’s naming experiment, was there a mismatch effect, and how did the neutral conditions compare?

Yes, the mismatch condition yielded significantly slower responses; the neutral condition was not significantly different from the match condition.

Comprehenders seem to routinely activate perceptual symbols that include ____, even when not implied or articulated by linguistic input.

Object shape

Representation of meaning from linguistic input is a dynamic process involving _____, not _____.

Malleable perceptual representations; mechanical combinations of discrete components.

Havas et al.’s study on Botulinum Toxin-A and emotional language had what overarching finding?

Involuntary facial expression plays a role in processing emotional language.

The results of Havas et al. showed that blocking facial expression by peripheral denervation of facial musculature…

Selectively hinders emotional language processing, with the effect occurring only for angry and sad sentence reading time, not happy.

How does the free expression of outward emotion compare to the repression of outward signs in the context of emotional language?

Intensifies emotional language processing; softens such processing.

What was the main significant effect in Havas et al.?

Sentence emotion and session; angry and sad reading times were longer in the 2nd session.

Facial feedback may be a context-sensitive source of information for…

Maintaining an internal model of the bouy’s emotional state.

According to Newell et al., what has become the central element of human problem-solving?

Heuristic methods

A mental image is defined as what by Newell et al.?

A symbol structure with definite properties on which well-defined processes can operate to retrieve specific types of information.

What are the primary characteristics of humans’ information-processing system?

A small short-term memory and an infinite long-term memory with fast retrieval, but slow storage.

What constitutes the adaptive interface between a processor’s invariant features and the environment’s shape?

The problem space and the task environment.

Each node in a problem space can be thought of as…

A possible state of knowledge that a problem solver may attain; what the problem solver knows about the problem at a moment of time.

What is means-end analysis?

A heuristic search system that finds differences between current and desired situations, finds an operator relevant to each difference, and applies the operator to reduce the difference.

Describe the progressive deepening strategy.

Returning to the base position to pick up a new exploration branch; represents a response to short-term memory limits.

Describe the scan-and-search strategy.

Alternates between selecting the most promising node for continuation and generating new nodes from such continuation.

Problem solving encompasses both the activities required to construct a problem space in the face of a new task environment and…

The activities needed to solve a given problem in some problem space, new or old.

What are the six sources of information that can help construct a problem space.

1. Task instructions

2. Previous experience with the same or similar tasks

3. Previous experience with analogous tasks

4. Generalized programs

5. Programs combining task instructions

6. Information gained while solving a problem

Humans seem to move between concrete and abstract objects without…

Treating the abstract objects as belonging to a separate problem space.

How can production systems explain how a complex program could develop step-by-step?

Individual productions are independent of each other’s structures, thus productions can be added to a system one by one; the condition itself is linked to the response.

When there is no clear schema, what is another determinant of what people attend to?

The comparisons we make.

What is an aligned structure?

The system of matching predicates and objects.

What is the difference between alignable differences and nonalignable differences.

Alignable differences are the nonidentical items placed in correspondence, while nonalignable differences are either not related to the commonalities or are related differently.

To compare mental representations with explicit relations between items, what do we do?

We carry out a process of structural alignment to find the maximal structural consistency, observing both parallel connectivity and one-to-one mapping.

What is parallel connectivity?

The arguments to corresponding representational elements must also be placed in correspondence.

What is one-to-one mapping?

Requires that each element in one representation match with at most one element in the other.

Comparison of two items draws attention to what?

The pair’s commonalities and alignable differences.

In Markman and Gentner’s experiment on alignability and memory, more information was recalled for _____ differences, and more incorrect information was recalled on average for _____ cues.

Alignable; nonalignable.

The superiority of alignable information reflects the importance of…

Shared coherent knowledge.

Comparisons facilitated by the presence of easily alignable perceptual information can…

Promote the acquisition of more abstract categorical commonalities.

What is problem representation?

A cognitive structure corresponding to a problem, constructed by a solver on the basis of theuir domain-related knowledge and its organization.

What is a canonical object frame?

A structure that augments object information in a problem associated information from the knowledge base.

What is perceptual chunking as it relates to experts representing problems?

Quickly establishing correspondence between externally presented events and internal models for these events.

Chi et al. found that novices tend to categorize physics problems by ____ _____, while experts classify problems according to major _____ ______.

Surface structure (keywords or abstracted visual configurations); physics principles (deep structure).

How did subjects with intermediate competency classified physics problems?

They neither uniformly grouped them according to surface features not physics laws.

According to Chi et al., advances novices begin to categorize by…

Principles with a gradual release from dependence on physical characteristics.

What is one similarity in how novices and experts classify problems?

They both can construct a somewhat enriched internal representation of problems.

When stating everything they could about problems and how they can be solved, novices mainly stated _____, while experts immediately mentioned _____.

Instantiated variables; relevant physics principles.

Expert’s production rules (if-then structures) contain explicit solution methods, which may be considered as…

Call to action schemata.

Both skill groups use the same basic set of features in problem statements, but…

Novices use features explicitly stated in the problem, while experts base selection of principles of resulting second-order cues.

What is a primary difference between novices’ and experts’ schemata?

Contain sufficiently elaborate declarative knowledge about problems’ physical configurations but lack abstracted solution methods; contain much procedural knowledge with explicit applicability conditions.

What are five main properties of human languages?

Communication, representation, arbitrariness, displacement, and productivity/generativity.

What is generativity in the context of human languages?

The ability to say a near-infinite amount of messages from a finite structure and set of rukes; dependent on syntax.

What is the difference between phonemes and morphemes?

Individual sounds/the atomic elements of speech; the simplest units of speech, not necessarily words.

Spoken language has no inherent spaces, but we can…

Segment individual words.

In contemporary written phonemic languages, what designates individual words?

Spaces (not a feature in earlier versions)

Developing a creole seems to require what?

Children who create complex syntactical language from a simpler pidgin.

Approximately when does the critical/sensitive period for human language learning end?

Puberty

How does overgeneralization occur in children?

Children use correct irregular verbs through mimicking, then overapply learned grammar rules, then learn exceptions to those rules.

Is Whorf’s theory of strong linguistic relativity true?

Probably not; there is evidence to suggest that thinking is not limited to our linguistic capacities.

What is the representativeness heuristic?

Probabilities are evaluated by the degree to which A is representative of, or resembles, B.

What is a common misrepresentation of chance?

People expect the essential characteristics of a process to be represented not just globally in a whole sequence, but locally in each of its parts.

When are prior probabilities utilized and ignored, in the context of evidence?

Used when no specific evidence is given; ignored when worthless evidence is given.

With the representativeness heuristic, the judged probability of a sample statistic will be essentially independent of…

Sample size

If people predict solely in terms of the favorableness of a description, their predictions will be insensitive to what two factors?

The reliability of evidence and the expected accuracy of the prediction.

What is the illusion of validity?

Unwarranted confidence produced by a good fit between a predicted outcome and input information.

Redundancy of inputs ____ accuracy even as it _____ confidence.

Decreases; increases

What is the availability heuristic?

People evaluate probabilities by the ease with which instances come to mind.

A class whose instances are more easily retrieved will appear more numerous than…

A class of equal frequency whose instances are less retrievable.

Judgment of how frequently two events co-occur could be based on the strength of what?

Their associative bond.

What is the idea of adjustment and anchoring?

Different starting points yield different estimates biased toward iniutial values.

People tend to overestimate the probability of _____ events due to their _____ structure, and underestimate the probability of ____ events due to their _____ structure.

Conjunctive; chain-like; disjunctive; funnel-like

Why are fundamental statistical principles, like regression towards the mean, not learned from everyday experiences?

Relevant instances are not appropriately coded.

True or False: An internally consistent set of subjective probabilities can be incompatible with other beliefs held by an individual.

True

How do locally representative sequences differ from chance expectation?

They have too many alterations and not long enough runs.

Across the 76ers field goal and free throw analyses, what trends were uncovered?

The outcomes were largely independent of the previous attempt’s outcome, and the frequency of streaks in players’ records did not exceed that predicted by a binomial model assuming a constant hit rate.

Across the controlled shooting experiment and the 76ers analysis, the hit probability after a hot period was…

Lower than following a cold period.

In the controlled shooting experiment, were players and observers successful in predicting hits and misses?

No; both shooters and observers predicted a hit if the shooter had made the previous shot, producing chance performance.

What is one explanation Gilovich et al. provides for belief in the hot hand?

A misperception of chance that operates even when data are in front of subjects rather than retrieved from memory.

The availability of _____ _____ may contribute to the erroneous belief that the probability of a hit is higher after a hit than a miss.

Plausible explanations

What does a decision problem consist of?

The acts or options among which one must choose, the possible outcomes or consequences of these acts, and the contingencies or conditional probabilities that relate outcomes to acts.

How is the frame a decision-maker adopts controlled?

The formulation of the problem and the decision-maker’s norms, habits, and personal characteristics.

Tversky and Kahneman (1981) asserts that choices involving gains are often _____, and choices involving losses are often _____.

Risk-averse; risk-taking

In prospect theory, how are outcomes expressed?

As positive or negative deviations from a neutral reference outcome.