Cognitive Psychology: Chapter 10-13 Vocabulary Questions and answers

Cognitive Psychology: Chapter 10-13 Vocabulary, visual imagery - ANS seeing in the absence of a visual stimulus Mental imagery - ANS the ability to recreate the sensory world in the absence of physical stimuli, also occurs in senses other than vision imageless thought debate - ANS This idea of a link between imagery and thinking gave rise to this, with some psychologists taking up Aristotle's idea that "thought is impossible without an image" and others contending that thinking can occur without images. paired-associate learning - ANS subjects are presented with pairs of words, like boat-hat or car-house, during a study period. They are then presented, during the test period, with the first word from each pair. Their task is to recall the word that was paired with it during the study period. Thus, if they were presented with the word boat, the correct response would be hat. conceptual peg hypothesis - ANS According to this hypothesis, concrete nouns create images that other words can "hang onto." For example, if presenting the pair boat-hat creates an image of a boat, then presenting the word boat later will bring back the boat image, which provides a number of places on which subjects can place the hat in their mind mental chronometry - ANS determining the amount of time needed to carry out various cognitive tasks mental scanning - ANS spatial correspondence between imagery and perception, is supported by a number of experiments by Stephen Kosslyn involving this task, where subjects create mental images and then scan them in their minds imagery debate - ANS a debate about whether imagery is based on spatial mechanisms, such as those involved in perception, or on mechanisms related to language, called propositional mechanisms spatial representation - ANS a representation in which different parts of an image can be described as corresponding to specific locations in space epiphenomenon - ANS The spatial experience of mental images, argues Pylyshyn, is an ______—something that accompanies the real mechanism but is not actually part of the mechanism. propositional representation - ANS a representation in which relationships can be represented by abstract symbols, such as an equation, or a statement such as "The cat is under the table." depictive representations - ANS Representations that are like realistic pictures of an object, so that parts of the representation correspond to parts of the object tacit knowledge explanation - ANS states that subjects unconsciously use knowledge about the world in making their judgments. mental walk task - ANS task in which subjects are asked to imagine that they are walking toward their mental image. imagery neurons. - ANS demonstrates a possible physiological mechanism for imagery and because these neurons respond in the same way to perceiving an object and to imagining it, thereby supporting the idea of a close relation between perception and imagery. unilateral neglect - ANS Damage to the parietal lobes can cause this condition, in which the patient ignores objects in one half of the visual field, even to the extent of shaving just one side of his face or eating only the food on one side of her plate method of loci— - ANS a method in which things to be remembered are placed at different locations in a mental image of a spatial layout. pegword technique - ANS involves imagery, as in the method of loci, but instead of visualizing items in different locations, you associate them with concrete words. food craving - ANS goes beyond ordinary hunger because of its intensity and specificity What is language? - ANS 1. Used for communication 2. Expresses our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences 3. Uses arbitrary symbols (sounds and shapes) 4. Possesses a hierarchical structure governed by rules - The rules are grammar and syntax 5. Is generative/creative (produce novel statements) -Chompsky: downfall of behaviorism -We have brains that are prepared for language 6. Is dynamic (evolves over time) The language Instinct and The Stuff of Thought (Pinkard) - ANS Language is an inate (and probably unique) feature of human behavior The structure of Language (Levels of Analysis) - ANS 1. Phonemes -Smallest unit of speech sounds 2. Words -Basic unit of the lexicon -semantic longterm -mental dictionary 3. Sentences -Ordering of words with syntactic structure 4. Texts -A group of related sentences **Ambiguities at each level