• Shuffle
    Toggle On
    Toggle Off
  • Alphabetize
    Toggle On
    Toggle Off
  • Front First
    Toggle On
    Toggle Off
  • Both Sides
    Toggle On
    Toggle Off
  • Read
    Toggle On
    Toggle Off
Reading...
Front

Card Range To Study

through

image

Play button

image

Play button

image

Progress

1/72

Click to flip

Use LEFT and RIGHT arrow keys to navigate between flashcards;

Use UP and DOWN arrow keys to flip the card;

H to show hint;

A reads text to speech;

72 Cards in this Set

  • Front
  • Back
Two types of representations in the mind:
Analogue

&

Propositional or allegorical
Why is imagery important?
- frees us from the present
- frees us from reality
- allows us to practice without moving
- mental maps
Paivio's Dual Coding Hypothesis
- Information is represented in a VERBAL and an IMAGINAL code
- It might be coded or stored in either or both systems (concrete words are remembered better than abstract words)
Anderson & Bower's Conceptual-Propositional Hypothesis
- analogue storage is beyond our capacity
- storage is likely to be in a propositional format
- participants shown the sentence 'the girl was kissed by the boy' and later recalled 'the boy kissed the girl' (same content, different structure)
Evidence for propositional effects in mental imagery:
- p's shown O____O and told they were either barbells or spectacles
- the spectacle people later recognised O__O as what they'd seen earlier and the barbell people recognised O_______O as what they;d seen earlier
Evidence for analogue effects in mental imagery:
- Transformations: p's told "take a D and turn it 90 degrees to the right then put a 4 on top, what do you have?" all said "boat"
- Size effect: elephant and frog vs. frog and fly thing
- Image scanning: direct relation between geographical distance and imagining going from one place to another
Sheppard & Krosslyn's Functional Equivalence Hypothesis
- mental imagery is not abstract propositional or analogue representation
- relationships between objects and imagery are functionally equivalent tot he relationships these objects have in the real world
- perception and imagery use the same cognitive mechanisms (imagery is instigated top-down, perception bottom-up)
Findings from Mental Rotation studies (supporting functional equivalence hypothesis)
- the more an image is rotated from canonical upright, the slower reaction time is
- another study had p's look at rotating circles and found that mental rotation was slower when they had to mentally rotate the opposite way
Symon's Interference Hypothesis
- most dreamers don't dream in auditory, tactile or olfactory experiences
- this could be because these cues in the real world remain important for survival
Lesions and impairments in perception and imagery
Bisiach & Luzzatti: - damage to right parietal lobe
> visual neglect syndrome
- neglect also in imagery space
Farah: - reduced image size after occipital lobectomy
- tunnel vision and tunnel imagery
Metabolic imaging studies and imagery
- imagery activates occipital and parietal lobes
- greater activation in in visual cortex when imagining than when perceiving (top-down more demanding than bottom-up)
- p's who claimed to have vivid imagery showed stronger occipital activation
Single Cell Recordings
- single cell recordings of directional cells in motor cortex
- cellular directional vector rotation rotation equivalent to mental rotation data
Episodic memory and episodic foresight
Episodic memory: reliving past events.

Episodic foresight: pre-living future events in our imagination.
Evidence for 'mental time-travel into the past and future may be two sides of the same cognitive mechanism'.
- similar brain activation
- similar psychological characteristics
- similar impairment
- similar development
The price of metal flexibility when constructing/imagining events in the future:
That when we construct past events (memory) we may at times do so more creatively rather than faithfully.
(Episodic memory may be an adaptive design feature of our foresight system (Suddendorf & Busby)).
Mental time travel in animals?
"Episodic-like" memory in scrub jays:
- recovered food in caches according to what was stored where and for how long
- worms are preferred over nuts but birds chose nuts over worms if a long period of time have passed because the nuts 'keep' better
Mental time travel in animals?
Foresight in animals:
- innate predispositions to deal with long-term regularities (e.g nest building, hibernation)
- individual learning (still stimulus bound and predicts only the very near future)
- no real obvious evidence yet for domain general, flexible acts to secure remote future benefits
What good is foresight?
- we can imagine virtually any potential future scenario
- allows us to act now to secure future advantages
- human survival heavily depends on this foresight
According to Chomsky, what 3 characteristics of language are uniquely and universally human?
Language is:
- generative (recursive)
- universal grammar
- critical period
5 properties of language:
- influencing minds
- not restricted to speech
- arbitrary symbols
- rule governed (grammar)
- hierarchical
Liberman's motor theory of speech perception:
- we hear sounds according to how we produce them - invariance lies in production, not in acoustic signal
4 'contexts' that help us to understand misheard parts of language:
- parallel computation (including surrounding phonemes)
- top-down processing (anticipations/expectations about what people are saying)
- visual cues
- lip reading
The McGurk Effect
- hearing one thing and thinking it sounds like something else because of the visual cue
- hearing /ba/
- seeing /ga/
- perceiving /da/
Morphemes
- smallest unit of MEANING (root words, prefixes and suffixes), not sound
- rule governed with how they're put together
- content morphemes and functional morphemes
- can be words themselves or combined with words
Syntax
- rules by which words are structured into phrases and phrases into sentences
- recursion (putting one phrase within another)
- parsing when a sentence or phrase can be interpreted more than one way
- little to do with meaning (semantics)
Chomsky's Universal Grammar
- underlying deep structure reflects innate organising principles of cognition
- languages differ in surface structure but underlying rules share many elements eg...
> subject, object, verb (Japanese)
> subject, verb, object (English)
Pragmatics
- how we use language in different settings (eg. politely, sarcastically)
- cooperative principle > quantity, quality, relation and manner
- often guided by socially understood scripts
4 neurological factors that are known to influence language:
- cerebral asymmetry
- brain damage
- Broca's area (productive aphasia, agrammatism - difficultly articulating)
- Wernike's area (receptive aphasia)
4 predictable stages of language acquisition:
- 8 months: practice pronouncing phonemes (babbling)
- 10-15 months: real words appear
- 18-24 months: rapid word acquisition (1 word every 2 hours), 2 word sentences
- 2-4 years: syntax acquisition
4 points about language instinct
- growth rather than learning
- critical period (Genie)
- poverty of the stimulus (must be biological to some extent as the exposure isn't good enough to explain acquisition)
- role of learning
4 points about Protolanguage
- great ape language projects: chimps, gorillas and orangutans
- 2 yer old children
- pidgin (kinds creating syntax in made up language)
- brain damage (Broca's area)
2 points about Bilingualism
- kids easily differentiate languages from 2 onwards
- 2nd language difficult to learn in adulthood > evidence for critical period (especially eradicating accents, suggesting that phoneme acquisition is dependent on critical period)
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
Strong version: thoughts generated in one language may be impossible to express in another
Weak version: each language favours certain thought processes over others
(weak version is supported)
2 main points about gestural language
- sign language fully syntactic
> same developmental stages like babbling
- theory that language evolved through sign language and later switched to vocalisations
5 points about Primates
- reliance on vision over smell
- encephalitic (larger brain relative to body size)
- five separate digits and finger nails
- mainly omnivorous
- we're closer related to chimps than they are to gorillas
Darwin's problem
- physical evolution: continuity of anatomy and vascular systems
- evolution of the mind: continuity of mental capacities
2 continuing controversies about gradation:
- what precisely are the mental powers of primates?
- what precisely are human traits?
2 biases in the literature:
Emphasizing discontinuity:
- to justify religious beliefs
- to justify human treatment of animals
Emphasizing continuity:
- to show that Darwin was right and humans area part of nature
- to show that the animal being worked with has a capacity
Empirical/experimental evidence that animals feel pain (in rats):
- normal rats prefer sugar water to water containing analgesic
- rats with chronically inflamed joints (which is painful in humans) however prefer the analgesic water
Lloyd Morgan's Canon (the principle of parsimony) tries to...
Attribute animal behaviour to the most simple explanation.
The Clever Hans phenomenon:
- Hans the horse could do sums
- only got them right when whoever asked Han's the question knew the answer themselves
- it was later found out that Han's would just stop stomping his foot when people reacted positively once he got the right number
Apes showing insight:
- picking appropriate tools even when problem is out of sight
- tool production in one place to use at another (different groups of apes use different tools for the same job (culture)
The machaivellian hypothesis of the evolution of intelligence:
- positive correlation with mean group size and neocortex ratio
- social intelligence as the prime mover
6 examples of primate social intelligence
- group living
- grooming
- social heirarchies
- keeping track of third party relations
- tactical deception
- cooperation
Social learning: Imitation and imitation recognition
- apes can imitate
- apes can recognise when they're being imitated
Animal communication:
- no other communication system is ope-ended like human language -&- no evidence of nonhuman syntactical languages however...
- playback studies show that certain cries mean different things (chickens have different cries for fox and snake, so when a snake cry is make, they try get up high, even when alone in a cage)
- Vervet monkeys have different calls for leopard, eagle, python, small cat, baboon and human
Teaching apes language systems
- attempts to teach vocal language has failed (vocal apparatus not sufficient)
- can somewhat teach chimps, gorillas and orangutans American sign language
- can teach chimps symbols and pointing
Kanzi's multi-modal system of language includes:
- lexigrams
- spoken English
- 100 american sign language signs and
- "natural gestures"
Kanzi's language ability
- comprehension similar to that of a 2 year old human
- no syntax
- began acquiring lexigram symbols spontaneously while researchers were trying to teach his foster mother Matata
Mirror self-recognition
- children pass the 'rouge test' by about 18 months old
- only the great apes (chimps, gorillas and orangutans) can
Pretence in apes
- pretence involves primary representations of reality and secondary representation of pretend world
- home-reared great apes play with dolls and treat them 'as if' animate
Secondary representation in human infants and apes
- in the middle of the second year, human infants show: pretence, insightful problem solving and mirror self recognition
- great apes show this too
What happened around 15 million years ago to the common ancestor we share with the great apes after gibbons branched off?
It's thought that the common ancestor developed the cognitive ability for secondary representation.
4 points that E. G. Boring made about intelligence tests after defining intelligence as "what intelligence teats measure":
- that they stay stable over time
- that children improve with age
- that their relative ranks tended to be maintained
- that people who are good at one part of these tests, tend to be good at other parts
Pinker's (1997) definition of intelligence:
The ability to attain goals in the face of obstacles by means of decisions based on rational rules.
Problems with Francis Galton's tests of intelligence that measured energy and sensitivity to physical stimuli:
Wissler found no correlation with student grades; doubting the existence of general ability.
Traditions in the testing of intelligence: 3 approaches
- pragmatic approach
- tests to identify 'defective' children
- mental age
What does IQ stand for and what's the OLD formulation for it?
- intelligence quotient
- (mental age ÷ chronological age) x 100 = IQ
- IQ now use a normal distribution for age range
What are two standard tests used to measure IQ and what is the mean for IQ tests?
- Standford-Binet test
- The Wechsler scales
- mean always = 100
In terms of quality control for intelligence tests, what is meant by validity, reliability, standardisation and norms?
- Validity: does it measure what it's supposed to measure?
- Reliability: does it measure consistently?
- Standardisation: conditions are the same for all test takers.
- Norms: translation of raw scores into scaled equivalents of relative levels of performance.
3 cognitive correlates and 1 biological correlate of IQ:
- Working memory capacity
- Simple information processing speed
- Inspection time (which of these 2 line is shortest?)

- less brain activity = higher IQ
4 biological VARIABLES that influence IQ:
- Heritability
- Nutrition
- Lead
- Prenatal exposure (alcohol, aspirin & antibiotics)
6 social variables that influence IQ:
- culture
- occupation
- schooling
- intervention
- family environment
- life experiences
What is the Flynn effect?
- the average IQ increases by 3 points every decade
- possibly from people learning how to take tests better
What role does testosterone play in IQ tests?
- males are better than female on visual spatial tasks
- but females are better than males on verbal sub-tasks
Thurston (1938) believed intelligence was composed of 7 primary mental abilities, those being:
- verbal comprehension
- verbal fluency
- inductive reasoning
- spatial visualisation
- number
- memory and
- perceptual speed
Guilford's factors of intelligence?
operations x products x contents
What is fluid and crystallised intelligence?
Fluid: understanding abstract relationships, as inductive reasoning, analogies.

Crystallised: accumulation of facts: vocabulary, general knowledge etc.
3 problems for psychometric approaches to intelligence:
- Theories: contradicting conclusions and difficulty testing these models against each other.
- Method: results have little to do 'mental processes', individual difference overlooks what intelligence people have in common.
- Data: restricted range of participants, tasks and situational contexts.
3 points about anthropological critique:
- Intelligence as a cultural invention
- Culture-fair tests
- Culture-relevant tests
Howard Gardiner's 9 multiple intelligences (try to remember maybe like 5?):
- linguistic
- logical mathematical
- musical
- spatial
- bodily-kinesthetic
- interpersonal
- intrapersonal
- naturalistic
- existential
Sternberg's triachic theory of 'successful intelligence:
- analytic (or componential) intelligence
- creative (or experiential) intelligence
- practical (or contextual) intelligence