Cog Psych Exam 3 Study Guide PDF

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The Blink Lectures -The Adaptive Unconscious (slides 15-16) - The part of our brain that leaps towards conclusions - That quickly and quietly processes a lot of information to allow us to function normally (Quick decision making process) - The mind operates efficiently by leaving a lot of high-level sophisticated thinking to the unconscious much like pilots planes can fly on autopilot - Adaptive unconscious sizes up world, warns of us danger -Factors determining marital stability and what is the most important predictor of marital stability (John Gottman’s studies) (slides 21-33) - For relationships, there are 4 critical negative predictors: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt - Contempt is by and large the most important determinant of marital stability (contempt is essentially any statement of superiority, made from a higher level) -Fists (slides 30-33) - distinctive patterns - what our unconscious bases its decision on -Friends vs. Strangers judgment of you (Samuel Gosling’s studies) (slides 35-40) - subjects fill out a questionnaire about their personality traits - subjects then select their closest friends to fill out the same questionnaire describing them - the experimenter then took strangers who had never met the students, gave them the same questionnaire and asked them to fill it out after spending 15 minutes looking through the subjects dorm room (no interaction with individual) - Friends describe us accurately - Strangers are not good at determining extraversion and are slightly less better than friends at determining agreeableness. For the other three scales though (conscientiousness, emotional stability, openness to experience), strangers are actually more accurate than friends - Overall, strangers rate us better than our friends do (thin-slicing) -Factors influencing whether a doctor will be sued for medical malpractice (slides 41-45) - Physicians who take more time answering questions in a friendly/gentle tone are rarely sued, those who are rushed, blunt, or unclear, are often sued

-The influence of conceptual priming on behavior (Bargh’s studies) (slides 51-59)

- Bargh primed participants by exposing them to words that primed the concept “old” - these people then walked out slower than they walked in - priming old supposedly made them walk slower -How the activation of stereotypes influence performance (slides 55-59) - Prior to the GRE questions, half of all subjects are asked to identify race (primes stereotypes of African Americans?) - People asked about their race do half as well as subjects who weren’t -The Implicit Association Test (IAT) (slides 67-78) - The implicit-association test is a measure designed to detect the strength of a person's automatic association between mental representations of objects in memory - Unconscious attitudes may be completely inconsistent with our stated conscious values - More than just an abstract measure of attitudes, a predictor of how we would act in spontaneous situations -Verbal Overshadowing (slides 104-110) - Verbal overshadowing describes the phenomenon where giving a verbal description of a face (or other complex stimuli) impairs recognition of that face or stimuli. -Insight (what is it) and insight problems (slides 108-110; text pages 398-399) - Insight puzzle: can’t be worked through systematically, you only get it in a moment of insight -How choice influences consumer decision making (slides 131-133) - Set up a booth with either 24 or 6 jam choices - Customers at the 6 jam booth bought jam 30% of the time - Customers at the 24 jam booth bought jam 3% of the time - Jam is an impulse item, and too many choices paralyzes the consumer -Sensation Transference (slides 144-146) - when a customer unconsciously transfers their perception of the way a product is packaged over to the actual product -The influence of expertise on cognition (slides 156-161) - Experts can say why they like things, they are taught a very specific vocabulary to quantify experience - Our unconscious reactions come out of a locked room, but with experience we become an expert at using our behaviour and training to interpret and decode what lies beneath our first impressions -Why it is difficult to gage public reaction to new and different things (slides 154156)

- The problem with almost all market research is it can not pick up the difference between different and bad - Unfortunately, things that are new and different are often thought of as bad by the general public…even though that’s not actually how people feel -Influence of extreme arousal on cognition (slides 170-174) - Complex motor skills break down - The forebrain shuts down and the mid-brain takes over - People stop making sense - Vision becomes restrictive - Behaviour becomes inappropriately aggressive - In some cases, people void their bowels - Blood drains, muscles harden - We also get clumsy and helpless Video: Capgras Delusion: a disorder in which a person holds a delusion that a friend, spouse, parent, or other close family member (or pet) has been replaced by an identical impostor -amygdala is cut, the person sees a person but doesn’t get the corresponding feelings and memories because of the cut amygdala so they think the person is an imposter Visual Neglect: patients fail to acknowledge stimuli on the side of space opposite to their unilateral lesion. -how pathway: involved with processing the object's spatial location relative to the viewer -what pathway: recognizing an object Phantom limb syndrome: feeling in a limb that is amputated -the brain has a map of what body parts we have, when that body part is amputated, the brain doesn’t catch up. The brain has specific parts that correspond to parts of the body. -the man in the video feels his phantom hand being touched when the doctor touches his face. this is because the face part of his brain started to take over the hand section. Blindsight: the ability of people who are blind due to lesions in their visual cortex respond to visual stimuli that they do not consciously see. -two separate pathways in the brain -one that consciously sees (visual cortex) -another goes through the brain stem, concerned with reflexes and unconscious Temporal lobe epilepsy: over stimulation in temporal lobe -pathways in temporal lobe become strengthened because of the seizures, patients now think everything has emotional significance rather than just a few things.

Lecture 4: Language -The five reasons why cognitive psychologists are interested in the study of language (slides 3-5) 1) Language is a unique form of abstraction, which is at the heart of cognition - Knowledge, semantic memory, gist processing, all forms of abstraction 2) language has a major impact on the form of representation of information in memory - Many memories are verbal (semantic) or are recalled in verbal form - Memories often become verbal rather than image based after continuous retelling 3) language provides one means to think about external events internally - thoughts, intentions, memories, are often thought of verbally as opposed to with imagery 4) language is the chief form of human information exchange - Most interactions center around verbal communication (though body language, visual cues can also be important) 5) language influences perception, from which we obtain the basic data for cognition - only way to describe/explain our percepts are verbally -Distinction between linguistics and psycholinguistics (slide 6) - Linguists study the structure of language - Psycholinguists (psychologists) study language use -The Four Levels of Language and what is represented at each level (phonemic: sounds, syntax: rules, semantic: meaning) …important distinction here: syntax is the rules governing the combination of morphemes into words while grammar is the rules governing the combination of words into phrases) (slides 7-13; Text pages 360-376) - The phoneme: a single speech sound that can be represented by a single symbol – is the basic unit of spoken language - Syntax: The rules that govern the operation of combining morphemes to produce words - Semantics: When morphemes are combined in such a way as to convey meaning - Semantics is the study of meaning - Psychologists are most interested in this level of language as this is the point where information transmission occurs - Pragmatics: takes phomenics, syntactics, and semantics, and incorporates the concept of intention into language -Transformational Grammar and the three items that comprise linguistic competence (Chomsky) (slides 15-21) - a type of grammar that describes a language in terms of transformations applied to an underlying deep structure in order to generate the surface structure of sentences that can actually occur.

1) Surface structure is the outward appearance of an utterance (tone of voice) 2) Deep structure is the underlying form (meaning) of an utterance 3) Transformation rules can be used to change either surface or deep structure (meaning can be realized in many different ways, no previous theory captured this idea) -How changes in surface structure vs. underlying meaning influence comprehension and memory of written text (slides 23-27) - people remember underlying meaning, rarely remember surface structure -Swinney, and Seidenberg et al.’s studies of lexical access (slides 33-34) - multiple word meanings are initially accessed, correct meaning is later chosen through context analysis -Seidenberg et al. examine this using reading speed and priming measures (read a sentence, then a target word aloud, word is either related or unrelated to items in the sentence) -Eye movements and reading comprehension (35-38) -When a word activates more than one meaning, the correct one is selected via context analysis -With eye movement monitoring, people spend a lot of time on “guitarist” to disambiguate the preceding word (bass) -Garden path sentences: what are they (slides 37-38; Text pages 372-372) - A garden-path sentence is a grammatically correct sentence that starts in such a way that a reader's most likely interpretation will be incorrect; the reader is lured into a parse that turns out to be a dead end or yields a clearly unintended meaning -Dyslexia and its characteristics (slides 40-41) - extreme difficulty in reading and in learning to read - beginning to realize that dyslexia is really a category of disorders - general language comprehension problem; not simply perceptual (originally thought to be a problem with seeing letters) - also affects spoken language though we usually don’t test this

-The distinction between Broca’s aphasics and Wernicke’s aphasics (slides 42-50) -Broca’s - have difficulty retrieving, holding (in STM) and working with words whether to produce or to understand speech - speech is halting and labored due to damage to parts of the brain that handle production and comprehension

- very frustrating for aphasic because they think normally, they just can’t ever find the right words for anything - aphasics have certain sounds that they just cannot seem to make, as if they had been individually sliced out of the brain -Wernicke’s - “word salad” - its victims have problems understanding, yet produce, fluid, meaningless utterances - have little ability to comprehend anything, -Agrammatism, what is it (slide 45) -a deficit in the ability to produce and comprehend grammatical sentences, Lecture 5: Cognitive biases -Bounded rationality, what is it and who proposed it - Decision making rationality is limited by available information and time one has, as well as their cognitive limitation - Proposed by Herbert A. Simon -What happens to patients that have damage to their brain in areas that control emotion generation - Patients with damage to the parts of brain that are responsible for emotion behaved like normal individuals, have intact logic, but have difficulty making decisions. -What is the ambiguity effect and how it relates to the Ellsburg Paradox - The ambiguity effect is a cognitive bias where decision making is affected by a lack of information. The effect implies that people tend to select options for which the probability of a favorable outcome is known, over an option for which the probability of a favorable outcome is unknown. -Ellsburg paradox: Imagine an urn contains 30 red balls and 60 black and yellow balls (unknown proportion)...1 ball will be randomly draw

Lecture 6: Judgment/Intelligence/Creativity (75 slides)

-What is judgment and what are its subcomponents (slides 3-6; text pages 435-437) -the processes we use to think about evidence, make inferences, and reach conclusions 1) Induction: a situation in which one begins with specific facts/observations and draws some general conclusion from them (ex. a detective using clues to figure out who the perpetrator is) 2) Deduction: a situation in which one begins with some general statement and figures out what specific claims reasonably follow from it (top down processing) -The Availability Heuristic (slides 8-11; text pages 456-459) -a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a person's mind -the faster something comes to mind, the more common we think it is -Confirmation bias (slide 12; text pages 462-463) -we are more alert and more responsive to evidence that confirms our beliefs/ conclusions than to evidence that might challenge them (ex. prejudice) -The Anchoring Effect (slide 13) -processing is influenced by your starting point (ex. the math problem demo in class) -The Representative Heuristic (slides 15-17; text pages 459-462) - assume that each member of a category is representative of that category (like the prototype) and has all its traits - also assume the reverse—if something has a lot of the traits of a category, it probably belongs to that category -The Simulation Heuristic (slides 18-20) - mentally modeling a possible event, and basing likelihood on that model -The Conjunction Fallacy (slides 27-29; text pages 460-462) -The conjunction fallacy is a formal fallacy that occurs when it is assumed that specific conditions are more probable than a single general one - “Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement “ as more probable than “Linda is a bank teller” - Statistically it’s less likely that someone is both a banker and feminist relative to either of these

-The four main features of all problems (slide 34) 1) a goal or description of what constitutes a solution

2) a description of objects relevant to achieving a solution 3) a set of operations or allowable actions toward a solution 4) a set of constraints not to be violated -The role of analogy in problem solving (slides 46-49; text pages 413-421) -use techniques used in the past to solve an unrelated problem -Mental set (slides 53-55; text pages 403-404) -a tendency to repeat a solution process that has succeeded previously -Functional Fixedness (slides 56-58; text pages 400-401) - treating an object as having only one function; not thinking creatively (ex. mounting a candle to a wall) -The four steps in the creative process (slides 70-72; text pages 423-426) 1) preparation: formulating and beginning 2) incubation: setting aside 3) illumination: achieving insight 4) verification: checking solution Lecture 7: Practical Applications (54 slides) -Influences of cognition on legal proceedings (e.g., eyewitness memory, police lineups) (slides 4-9) - Signal detection theory – trying to isolate a signal (criminal) from noise (distractors) - What they learned from cognition: nature of distractors is important…you need to reduce guessing probability to acceptable levels (use up to 6 people) - Distractors also need to be similar enough to the target to prevent process of elimination 1) Try to make distractors similar enough that process of elimination isn’t possible 2) Inform the victim that the suspect may not be in the lineup to get a fairer criterion 3) No longer rely on victim’s confidence since confidence and accuracy are have very little relation -The Simon Effect (slides 13-14) -The finding that reaction times are faster when stimulus and response occur at the same location (same visual/response field) -Used in the design of airplanes and equipment where ms can make a difference -How to improve the comprehensibility of messages (slides 16-22) - participants are faster to determine whether a sentence is true or false if it contains only positives

- voice switch (female to male or male to female) gets people’s attention - message given as though through an authority gets people to listen -How and why cell phone use affects driving (slide 25) - research shows it’s the cognitive demands, not the physical ones (holding the cellphone, pressing buttons) that are dangerous -How cognition is manipulated in advertising (slides 27-33) - repetition matters - people tend to extract gist of messages, not specific words presented - importance of distinctness - 30 second ads instead of 45 seconds because people can process info quickly and still get the message -Speed reading, is it possible (slides 34-36) - no -The influence of setting goals on performance (slide 39) - set a specific (higher) goal—e.g., 90% correct on the test—rather than setting the standard goal—i.e., “doing your best” - people perform better when they set high goals relative to standard goals -How underlining information affects memory (slide 40) - taking notes in class or underlining in books does not help on tests unless you study them later - just the process of doing this does not ensure success or enhanced attention...