Cognitive Psychology, Exam 3

Front 1

Helsabeck (1975)

Back 1

syllogism solving performance can improve with training

Front 2

Rips & Marcus (1977)

Back 2

100% of college students got modus ponens (affirming the antecedent), while only 60% got modus tollens (denying the consequent). Confirmation bias

Front 3

Wason & Johnson-Laird (1972)

Back 3

Wason task: "If a card has a vowel on one side, then it has an even number on the other side" 33% correctly turned over the "E" (modus tollens) but only 4% turned over the 7 card. (modus tollens)

Front 4

Johnson-Laird et. al

Back 4

Used Young/Old and Beer/Coca-Cola for a "realistic" version of the Wason task. People performed much better.

Front 5

Banks et al.

Back 5

Symbolic distance effect: RT increase the closer two numbers are together when asked: "Which is bigger?"

Front 6

Holyoak and Mah

Back 6

Symbolic distance effect in cities, geographically. The farther away the cities were from Home, the closer they seemed in a mental representation.

Front 7

Kahneman and Tversky

Back 7

Representativeness heuristic: an estimate of the probability or likelihood of an event is determined by (1) how similar the event is to the population of events it came from or (2) whether the event seems similar to the process which produced it.

Front 8

Tversky and Kahneman (73)

Back 8

Availability heuristic: estimates are influenced by the ease with which relevant examples can be remembered.


Words that begin with the letter "R" or "K" versus those words that have the letter "R" or "K" in the third position. We immediately think of many words that begin with the letters "R" (roar, rusty, ribald) or "K" (kangaroo, kitchen, kale), but its harder to think of words where "R" or "K" is the third letter (street, care, borrow, acknowledge)

Front 9

Lichtenstein et al

Back 9

What is more likely to kill you? More publicized deaths (murders, airplane crashes) were falsely listed as more common. Availability heuristic.

Front 10

Metcalfe and Wiebe

Back 10

Modal warmth ratings before solving an algebra problem rose steadily, but "insight" problems suddenly jumped from nothing to the solution!

Front 11

Kaplan and Simon

Back 11

o A chessboard with two corners detached- is it possible to place dominos (that can cover two squares) and place them so they cover exactly?
o Four variations:
1. A board filled with blank squares.
2. A board with pink and black squares (as shown in the diagram here).
3. A board in which the squares were labelled with the words "pink" and "black", instead of the colours themselves.
4. A board in which the squares were labelled with the words "bread" and "butter".
Performance increased from problems 1 - 4. The correct answer is that it is not possible to cover the board in dominos. On an un-mutilated board there are 32 black and 32 pink squares.. However, on the un-mutilated board there are 32 black squares but only 30 pink squares. Therefore, it is not possible to cover the board exactly.
A better way to represent the problem is to include the exact numbers of black and pink squares, plus the information that a domino will cover one of each.

Front 12

Luchins

Back 12

3 water jugs, each with a different capacity, and asked to measure out a quantity of water using just the three jugs.

He sequenced the problems so that people developed a particular approach for measuring out the quantities (B minus 2C minus A: fill jug B, subtract C from it twice, then subtract A)
Results: (1) People did not notice far simpler solutions
(2) People failed to solve later problems by developing a new method

Front 13

Simon and Newell

Back 13

Tower of Hanoi problem: problem solving as a search, developed the means-end analysis heuristic.

Front 14

Dunker

Back 14

the candle problem- tacks in a box, a candle, match. Stick candle to the wall
• Solution: tack the box to the wall and mount the candle on it. Use the box as something other than a container

Front 15

Chase and Simon

Back 15

Study on chess experts showed they could more quickly memorize positions on board based on real games, organization of knowledge.

Front 16

Chi

Back 16

Experts in physics organized physics questions by properties, differently than novices.

Front 17

Paige and Simon

Back 17

Paige and Simon (1966) conducted a study where they presented subjects with an algebra problem. (A board was sawed into two pieces. One was 2/3 the length of the original and was smaller than the other piece by 4 feet..)The expert group quickly realized that the problem was logically impossible.

Front 18

McKelvie

Back 18

Famous names were perceived as being more frequent (accessibility heuristic)

Front 19

Wenger and Wheatley

Back 19

Addresses the issue of free will. Two participants (one was real, the other was a confederate). One mouse on cardboard, like a wiji board. Watched a computer screen with different objects on it, saw the cursor moving. Subjects heard words being played over a set of headphones. At random intervals, the real subject is told to stop moving the mouse. Confederate is told to stop the cursor on a specific object the real participant heard.

“Did you intend to stop the cursor over that object”

At 30 second interval, 45% of participants said they intended to put the cursor there.
At a 1 second interval, 60% of participants said they intended to put the cursor there. Subjective experience of being a causal agent.

Front 20

Libet et. al

Back 20

Libet et al. (1993)
Subjects are told to press a button whenever they want, and indicate time they decided to press it. They used ERP to look at brain activity during the task, the motor cortex. Result: part of brain that initiates button pressing occurs 350 milliseconds prior to when they record having the intention.

Sequence of events indicates that awareness states do not have any influence on brain states. Consciousness comes along, produced by brain states, but doesn’t have casual influence. (Lag). We have a bias of interpreting ourselves in control over the behavior.

Front 21

Vohs and Schooler

Back 21

Reading about free will= not cheating. Reading about lack fo free will = cheating.