Psychology Exam #3 General Study Guide

What number of mental activities does thinking involve?

• Concepts

• Problem-Solving

• Decision Making

• Judgment formation

What are concepts?

The mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people

I.g. There are a variety of chairs that share common features that make them a chair.

How do concepts develop?

They can be formed with definitions, but mostly they form with mental images or typical examples (prototypes.) A robin would be a prototype of a bird, but a penguin is not.

What are some problem-solving strategies?

• Trial and Error

• Algorithms

• Heuristics

• Insight

What are algorithms?

Very time confusing processes that exhaust all possibilities before arriving at a solution, computers use these.

What are Heuristics?

Simple thinking strategies that allow individuals to make judgments and solve problems efficiently. They’re less time consuming than algorithms but are more error-prone.

What is Insight?

It is a sudden novel realization of a solution to a problem; “Aha! I finally get it!”

What is Overconfidence?

A tendency to overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgments.

What is Exaggerated Fear?

An Exaggerated Fear of what may happen, such as 9/11 sparking fear in air travel.

What is the Belief Perseverance Phenomenon?

The tendency to cling to our beliefs in the face of contrary evidence.

What is Language?

The spoken, written, our gestured work that we use to communicate to ourselves and others.

How do we develop languages?

People will learn up to 3,500 words a year and amass 60,000 words by the time they graduate high school.

When is Language learned?

• Babbling Stage:

  • At 4 months, the infant makes various sounds. Not imitation of adult speech.

• One-Word Stage:

  • Around the first birthday, they begin to speak one word at a time.

• Two-Word Stage:

  • Before the 2nd year, they will start to speak in two-word sentences.

• Longer Phrases:

  • The children will begin uttering longer phrases with syntactical sense.

What is Operant Learning?

Skinner believed that language development may be explained on the basis of learning principles such as association, imitation, and reinforcement.

What is Inborn Universal Grammar?

Chomsky suggested that the rate of language acquisition is so fast that it cannot be explained through learning principles, and thus most of it is inborn.

What is most important for language development?

Childhood, as if never exposed to any by the age of 7 they will lose the ability to master any.

What happens if the brain imagines doing a physical activity?

It will activate the same brain regions as if they are performing the activity.

Do animals have insight?

Chimpanzees have shown behavior using tools to solve problems.

Do animals have culture?

Animals display customs that are learned and transmitted over generations

Can animals learn languages?

Chimps will sign for hopes of receiving a reward, Steven Pinker concluded, “chimps do not develop language.”

What is Intelligence?

The ability to learn from experience, solve problems, and use our knowledge to adapt to new situations.

What is General Intelligence (g)?

The idea exists from the work of Charles Spearman who helped develop the factor analysis approach in statistics.

What is Howard Gardner’s forms of intelligence?

• Linguistic

• Logical-mathematical

• Musical

• Spatial

• Bodily-kinesthetic

• Intrapersonal (self)

• Interpersonal (Other people)

• Existential

What is Robert Sternberg’s forms of intelligence?

• Analytical Intelligence

• Creative Intelligence

• Practical Intelligence

What is Emotional intelligence?

The ability to perceive, understand, and use emotions.

What are the four components of Emotional Intelligence?

• Perceiving emotion

• Understanding emotion

• Managing emotion

• Using emotion

Who is Alfred Binet?

He practiced a more modern form of intelligence testing by developing questions predicting the child’s future progress in the Paris school system.

Who is Lewis Terman

He adapted Binet’s test for the U.S. and named it the Standford-Binet test. It used William Stern’s IQ forumula: IQ = mental age/ chronological age * 100

Who is David Wechsler?

He developed the WAIS and WISC, a more adept intelligence test for adults and children. This test measures overall intelligence and other aspects related to it.

What are the Principles of Test Construction?

• Standardization

• Reliability

• Validity

What is Standardization?

The process of administering the test to a representative sample of future test takers to establish a basis for meaningful comparison; the normal curve, is “bell-shaped.“

What is Reliability?

When a test yields consistent results.

What forms of Reliability are there to determine if a test is truly reliable?

• Split-half: Dividing the test into two halves and assessing the scores' consistency.

• Test-Retest: Using the same test on two occasions to measure consistency.

What is Validity?

If a test succeeds what it’s supposed to measure or predict.

What forms of Validity are there?

• Content: refers to how a test measures a particular behavior or trait.

• Predictive: Refers to the function of a test in predicting a particular behavior or trait.

What are the two extreme groups of intelligence?

• Mentally impaired (IQ 70)

• High intelligence (IQ 135)

What are the different groups of mentally impaired individuals?

• Mild (50-70 IQ)

• Moderate (35-50 IQ)

• Severe (20-35 IQ)

• Profound (Below 20 IQ)

What are the genetic influences of IQ?

It is common that twins, family members, and adopted children will have similar intelligence.

What are the adoption studies about intelligence?

Adopted children show a marginal correlation in verbal ability to their adopted parents.

What is the Heritability of intelligence?

50% of variation

What are some environmental influences on intelligence?

• Fraternal twins raised together tend to show similarities in intelligence

• Identical twins raised apart show slightly less similarity in intelligence.

Are there racial differences in intelligence?

Yes, different groups differ in average scores.

Why does environment affect intelligence?

• Races are remarkably alike genetically

• Race is a social category

• Asian students outperform N.A. students on math achievement and aptitude tests.

• Today’s population has a higher IQ than the population of the 1930s

• White and Black infants tend to score equally well

• Different ethnic groups have experienced periods of remarkable achievement in different eras

Are there gender differences in intelligence?

• Women are better spellers

• Women are verbally fluent and have large vocabularies

• Women are better at locating objects

• Women are more sensitive to touch, taste, and color

• Women detect emotions more easily than men do.

• Men outnumber women in counts of underachievement

• Men outperform women at math problem-solving, but underperform at math computation