PSY 207 Exam 4; Chapters 11, 12, and 15

Chapter 11:

1. Chronometric Study 

   1. Literally, "time-measuring" studies;generally, studies that measure the amount of time a task takes. Sometimes used as a way of examining the task's components or as a way of examining which brain events are simultaneous with specific mental events.

2. Self-Report Data

   1. A form of evidence in which a person is asked directly about their own thoughts or experiences. 

3. Image-Scanning Procedure

   1. An experimental procedure in which participants are instructed to form a specific mental image and then are asked to scan, with their “mind’s eye,” from one point in the image to another. By timing these scans, the experimenter can determine how long “travel” takes across a mental image

4. Evidence that we think in images 

   1. evidence that we think in images comes from studies showing that people use mental imagery in tasks like mental rotation, image scanning, and problem-solving—and that these tasks often take longer when the imagined actions would take longer in real life.

5. Evidence that long term memory is in propositions 

   1. comes from findings that people remember the meaning or gist of information better than exact wording, and that memory errors often involve semantic confusions.

   2. Propositions are abstract, meaning-based units that represent relationships between concepts (e.g., "The cat is under the table"). Studies show that even when surface details differ, people recall the underlying ideas, supporting the idea that long-term memory encodes information in propositional form.

6. Dual Coding 

   1. A theory that imageable materials, such as high-imagery words, will be doubly represented in memory: The word itself will be remembered, and so will the corresponding mental image.

7. Mental Rotation Task

   1.  An experimental procedure in which participants have to determine whether a shape differs from a target only in its position and orientation or whether the shape has a form different from the shape of the target.

8. Demand Character

   1.  Cues within an experiment that signal to participants how they are “supposed to” respond.

9. Visual image vs. Spatial image 

   1. Visual 

      1. A visual image refers to a mental picture of the appearance of an object or scene.

      2. It includes color, shape, size, texture, and specific visual details.

      3. Example: Imagining what your bedroom looks like, including the color of the walls and the shape of the furniture.

      4. Related to what things look like.

   2. Spatial 

      1. A spatial image refers to a mental representation of the spatial relationships among objects or locations.

      2. It includes position, direction, movement, and distance in space.

      3. Example: Mentally rotating a 3D object or imagining how to get from your house to the grocery store.

      4. Related to where things are and how they move.

10. Eidetic Imagery 

    1.  A relatively rare capacity in which the person can retain long-lasting and detailed visual images of scenes that can be scrutinized as if they were still physically present.

11. Aphantasia 

    1. the inability to voluntarily generate mental images in the mind’s eye.

       1. cannot visualize things like faces, places, or objects—even when asked to imagine them

12. Boundary Extension 

    1. A tendency for people to remember pictures as being less “zoomed in” (and therefore having wider boundaries) than they actually were.

Chapter 12:

1. Availability Heuristic 

   1. A particular form of attribute substitution in which the person needs to judge the frequency of a certain type of object or the likelihood of a certain type of event. For this purpose, the person is likely to assess the ease with which examples of the object or event come to mind; this “availability” of examples is then used as an index of frequency or likelihood.

2. Representativeness Heuristic

   1. A strategy that is often used in making judgments about categories. This strategy is broadly equivalent to making the assumption that, in general, the instances of a category will resemble the prototype for that category and, likewise, that the prototype resembles each instance. 

3. Heuristic

   1.  A strategy that is reasonably efficient and works most of the time. In using a heuristic, the person is cho

4. Frequency Estimate 

   1. An essential step in judgment, in which someone makes an assessment of how often they have experienced or encountered a particular object or event.

5. Attribute Substitution 

   1. A commonly used strategy in which a person needs one tpe of information but relies instead on a more accessible form of information. This strategy works well if the more accessible form of information is well correlated with the desired information. An example is the case in which someone needs information about how frequent an event is in the world and relies instead on how easily they can think of examples of the event.

6. Illusion of Covariation

   1. A relationship between two variables such that the presence (or magnitude) of one variable can be predicted from the presence (or magnitude) of the other. Covariation can be positive or negative. If it is positive, then increases in one variable occur when increases in the other occur. If it is negative, then decreases in one variable occur when increases in the other occur.

7. Belief Perseverance 

   1. A tendency to continue endorsing some assertion or claim, even when the clearly available evidence completely undermines that claim.

8. Confirmation Bias

   1. A family of effects in which people seem more sensitive to evidence that confirms their beliefs than they are to evidence that challenges their beliefs. Thus, if people are given a choice about what sort of information they would like in order to evaluate their beliefs, they request information that's likely to confirm their beliefs.Likewise, if they're presented with both confirming and disconfirming evidence, they're more likely to pay attention to, be influenced by, and remember the confirming evidence, rather than the disconfirming.

9. Categorical syllogisms 

   1. A logical argument containing two premises and a conclusion, and concerned with the properties of, and relations between, categories. An example is "All trees are plants. All plants require nourishment. Therefore, all trees require nourishment." This is a valid syllogism, since the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion.

10. Valid syllogisms

    1. A syllogism for which the conclusion follows from the premise, in accord with the rules of logic.

11. Invalid syllogisms 

    1. A syllogism (such as a categorical syllogism, or a syllogism built on a conditional statement) in which the conclusion is not logically demanded by the premises.

12. Premises

    1. The assertions used as the starting point for a logical argument. The premises may or may not be true; logic is concerned instead only with whether a conclusion follows from the premises.

13. System 1 (Type 1 thinking)

    1. A commonly used name for judgment and reasoning strategies that are fast and effortless, but prone to error.

14. System 2 (Type 2 thinking)

    1. A commonly used name for judgment and reasoning strategies that are slower and require more effort than Type 1 thinking.

15. Framing 

    1. In the context of decision making, a term referring to how the options for a decision (or, in some cases, the decision itself are described. Often, the framing determines whether the decision is cast in terms of gains or positive attributes (e.g., what you might gain from this or that option), or whether the decision is cast in terms of losses or negative attributes.

16. Affect in decisions 

    1. the influence of emotions and feelings on how people make choices.

    2. Rather than relying purely on logic or reasoning, people often use emotional reactions—like fear, pleasure, or anxiety—as a guide in decision-making.

17. Affective Forecasting 

    1. The process in which a person predicts how they will feel at some future point about an object or state of affairs. It turns out that people are surprisingly inaccurate in these predictions and, for example, understate their own capacity to adapt to changes.

18. Base-rate Information

    1. Information about the broad likelihood of a particular type of event (also referred to as "prior probability"). Often contrasted with diagnostic information.

19. Diagnostic Information 

    1. Information about a particular case; often contrasted with base-rate information.

20. Dual-Process Model

    1. Any model of thinking that claims people have two distinct means of making judgments-one of which is fast, efficient, but prone to error, and one that is slower, more effortful, but also more accurate.

21. Induction 

    1. A pattern of reasoning in which a person seeks to draw general claims from specific bits of evidence. Often contrasted with deduction.

22. Deduction 

    1. A process through which a person starts with claims, or general assertions, and asks what further claims necessarily follow from these premises. Often contrasted with induction.

23. Belief bias 

    1. A tendency, within logical reasoning, to endorse a conclusion if the conclusion happens to be something one believes is true anyhow. In displaying this tendency, people seem to ignore both the premises of the logical argument and logic itself, and they rely instead on their broader pattern of beliefs about what is true and what is not.

24. Conditional statements 

    1. A statement of the format "If X then Y, with the first part (the "if" clause, or antecedent) providing a condition under which the second part (the "then" clause, or consequent) is guaranteed to be true.

25. Selection Task 

    1. An experimental procedure, commonly used to study reasoning, in which a person is presented with four cards with certain information on either side of the card. The person is also given a rule that may describe the cards, and the person's task is to decide which cards must be turned over to find out if the rule describes the cards or not. Also called the four-card task.

26. Utility Maximization

    1. The proposal that people make decisions by selecting the option that has the greatest utility.

27. Risk Seeking 

    1. A tendency toward seeking out risk. People tend to be risk seeking when contemplating losses, presumably because they're willing to gamble in hopes of avoiding (or diminishing) their losses. Often contrasted with risk aversion.

28. Risk Aversion 

    1. A tendency toward avoiding risk. People tend to be risk averse when contemplating gains, choosing instead to hold tight to what they already have. Often contrasted with risk seeking.

29. Reason-Based Choice 

    1. ​​A proposal for how people make decisions. The central idea is that people make a choice when-and only when-they detect what they believe to be a persuasive reason for making that choice.

30. Somatic Markers 

    1. States of the body used in decision making. For example, a tight stomach and an accelerated heart rate when a person is thinking about a particular option can signal to the person that the option has risk associated with it.

Chapter 15: 

1. Cognitive Unconscious

   1. The broad set of mental activities of which people are completely unaware but that make possible ordinary thinking, remembering, reasoning, and so on.

2. Blind Sight 

   1. A pattern resulting from brain damage, in which the person seems unable to see in part of their field of vision but can often correctly respond to visual inputs when required to do so by an experimenter.

3. Subliminal Perception 

   1. ​​A pattern in which people perceive and are in some ways influenced by inputs they did not consciously notice.

4. Action Slips

   1. An error in which a person performs some behavior or makes some response that is different from the behavior or response intended.

5. Metacognitive Skills 

   1. Skills that allow people to monitor and control their own mental processes.

6. Metamemory

   1. People's knowledge about, awareness of, and control over their own memory.

7. Neural Correlates of Consciousness 

   1. the specific brain processes and structures that are directly associated with conscious experience.

8. Neuronal Workspace Hypothesis 

   1. A specific claim about how the brain makes conscious experience possible; the proposal is that "workspace neurons" link together the activity of various specialized brain areas, and this linkage makes possible integration and comparison of different types of information.

9. Qualia (sing. quale)

   1. The subjective conscious experiences, or "raw feelings" of awareness. Examples include the pain of a headache and the exact flavor of chocolate.

10. Mind-body Problem 

    1. The difficulty in understanding how the mind (a nonphysical entity) and the body (a physical entity) can influence each other, so that physical events can cause mental events, and mental events can cause physical ones.