PSY 108: Cognitive Psychology Final

Foundations of Cognitive Psychology

Zeitgeist

• Refers to the prevailing ideas, beliefs, and cultural norms of a particular time period
• Influences the development of theories and research paradigms in cognitive psychology

Mental Set

• A tendency to approach problems in a particular way based on past experiences or habits
• Can influence problem-solving by narrowing down potential solutions

Bruner and Potter (1964) Illusion

• Demonstrated how expectations and context can influence perception
• Used ambiguous images, such as the rabbit-duck illusion, which can be perceived in multiple ways based on mental set and context

Examples of Mental Sets

• Rabbit-duck image: Can be perceived as either a rabbit or a duck depending on mental set
• Old or young lady: Ambiguous image that can be perceived as either an old woman or a young woman based on mental set
• Dalmatian: Classic ambiguous figure that can be seen as both a dalmatian dog and a group of people
• Spinning dancer: Optical illusion where the direction of the dancer's rotation can be perceived differently based on mental set

Insight Problems (Aha Moments)

• Not twins problem: Classic problem where two people who are not twins celebrate their birthdays on the same day
• Donkey matchstick problem: Involves moving only one matchstick to make the donkey face the opposite direction
• Six matchstick problem: Requires rearranging six matchsticks to form four equilateral triangles
• 10 coins problem: Involves moving only three coins to create three equal rows with four coins in each row

Examples of Zeitgeists in Psychology

• Structuralism: Early approach that aimed to analyze the basic elements of consciousness through introspection
• Functionalism: Emphasized the adaptive functions of behavior and mental processes
• Associationism and Behaviorism: Focus on observable behavior and the principles of association, reinforcement, and conditioning
• Cognitive Psychology: Focuses on the study of mental processes such as perception, memory, language, problem-solving, and decision-making
• Cognitive Neuroscience: Integrates cognitive psychology with neuroscience, studying how brain structures and functions underlie cognitive processes

Perception and Sensation

• Perception: the process of interpreting sensory information received from the environment, involving organizing and interpreting sensory input to give meaning to the environment.
• Sensation: the process by which our sensory receptors and nervous system receive and represent stimulus energies from our environment.

Perceptual Organization

• Perceptual organization: the process of organizing and interpreting sensory information into meaningful wholes.
• Involves processes such as:
  • Grouping
  • Figure-ground segregation
  • Depth perception

Gestalt Psychology and "Laws of Perceptual Organization"

• Gestalt psychology: a school of thought that emphasizes the importance of organizing sensory information into meaningful wholes.
• "Laws of perceptual organization" describe principles such as:
  • Proximity
  • Similarity
  • Closure
  • Continuity
  • Common fate
  • Govern how we perceive and organize visual stimuli.

Figure-Ground Segregation

• Figure-ground segregation: the perceptual process of distinguishing an object from its surrounding background.

Bottom-Up vs. Top-Down Perception

• Bottom-up perception: processing sensory information from the environment to form perceptions. (e.g., seeing a car approaching on the road)
• Top-down perception: using pre-existing knowledge and expectations to interpret sensory information. (e.g., seeing something moving quickly in peripheral vision and interpreting it as a car because you're near a road)
• Interact when we perceive a familiar object (top-down) but then notice specific details (bottom-up) that make us rethink what we're seeing.

Change Blindness and Inattentional Blindness

• Change blindness: the phenomenon where people fail to notice changes in their environment, typically when changes occur gradually or when attention is diverted elsewhere.
• Inattentional blindness: the phenomenon where people fail to notice a fully-visible, but unexpected object because their attention is focused elsewhere.
• Both highlight the limitations of our attention and perception.

Depth Perception

• Depth perception: the ability to perceive the distance of objects from us.
• Monocular depth cues: can be perceived with one eye, such as linear perspective and texture gradient.
• Binocular depth cues: rely on the input from both eyes to perceive depth, such as retinal disparity and convergence.

Importance of Studying Illusions

• We study illusions to understand how perception works and to uncover the mechanisms behind perceptual errors.
• Illusions demonstrate that our perception can be influenced by factors such as context, expectations, and cognitive biases.

Examples of Illusions

• Cafe-Wall illusion: a pattern of alternating light and dark horizontal lines that create the illusion of slanted vertical lines.
• Depth perception illusions:
  • Ames Room
  • Mueller-Lyer illusion
  • Shepard illusion: an optical illusion that creates the impression of a continuous upward or downward movement.
• Auditory illusions:
  • Shepard tone: an auditory illusion that creates the perception of a continuously rising or falling pitch.
  • Expectancy effect: the tendency for perception to be influenced by expectations or beliefs.
  • McGurk effect: an illusion where the perception of speech sounds is influenced by visual information.

Other Important Concepts

• Silhouettes: the perception of shapes based on the contours or outlines of objects.
• Contrast detection: the ability to detect differences in luminance or color between objects.
• Color constancy: the tendency to perceive colors as stable despite changes in lighting conditions.
• Shape constancy: the tendency to perceive the shape of an object as constant despite changes in viewing angle.

Perception and Sensation

• Definition of perception: the process of interpreting sensory information received from the environment, involving organizing and interpreting sensory input to give meaning to the environment.
• Definition of sensation: the process by which our sensory receptors and nervous system receive and represent stimulus energies from our environment.

Perceptual Organization

• Perceptual organization: the process of organizing and interpreting sensory information into meaningful wholes, involving processes such as grouping, figure-ground segregation, and depth perception.
• Gestalt psychology: a school of thought that emphasizes the importance of organizing sensory information into meaningful wholes.
• Laws of perceptual organization: principles such as proximity, similarity, closure, continuity, and common fate, which govern how we perceive and organize visual stimuli.

Bottom-Up and Top-Down Perception

• Bottom-up perception: processing sensory information from the environment to form perceptions.
• Top-down perception: using pre-existing knowledge and expectations to interpret sensory information.
• Interaction between bottom-up and top-down perception: they interact when we perceive a familiar object (top-down) but then notice specific details (bottom-up) that make us rethink what we're seeing.

Change Blindness and Inattentional Blindness

• Change blindness: the phenomenon where people fail to notice changes in their environment, typically when the changes occur gradually or when attention is diverted elsewhere.
• Inattentional blindness: the failure to notice a fully-visible, but unexpected object because attention is focused elsewhere.

Depth Perception

• Definition: the ability to perceive the distance of objects from us.
• Monocular depth cues: cues that can be perceived with one eye, such as linear perspective and texture gradient.
• Binocular depth cues: cues that rely on the input from both eyes, such as retinal disparity and convergence.

Illusions

• Why we study illusions: to understand how perception works and to uncover the mechanisms behind perceptual errors.
• Examples of illusions:
  • Cafe-Wall illusion
  • Ames Room and Mueller-Lyer illusion
  • Shepard illusion
  • When worlds collide
  • Silhouettes

Attention and Consciousness

Definition of Attention

• Definition: the process of selectively concentrating on specific aspects of the environment while ignoring others.

Divided Attention

• Definition: the ability to focus on multiple tasks simultaneously.
• Measurement: dichotic listening.

Theories of Attention

• Broadbent's Filter Theory: information is filtered early in the processing stream based on physical characteristics before further processing occurs.
• Treisman's Filter Amplitude Theory: instead of completely filtering out unattended information, it is attenuated or weakened, allowing some of it to be processed to some extent.
• Deutsch & Deutsch late selection theory: all sensory input is processed to the level of meaning before selection occurs based on relevance or importance.
• Perceptual Load Theory: attentional selection is influenced by the perceptual load of the task, with high-load tasks leading to reduced processing of irrelevant stimuli.

Visual Search

• Definition: the process of actively looking for a particular target among other distractors in a visual scene.
• Phenomena associated with visual search:
  • Feature integration theory
  • Pop-out effect
  • Conjunction search

Automaticity

• Definition: the ability to perform a task with little conscious effort or awareness.
• Characteristics:
  • Efficiency
  • Lack of conscious control
  • Resistance to interference
• Examples:
  • Driving a familiar route
  • Typing
  • Riding a bike

Consciousness

• Definition: the state of being aware of and able to perceive one's surroundings, thoughts, and sensations.

Levels of Consciousness

• Non-consciousness (aka unconscious): processes that occur without awareness or intention, such as basic physiological functions like breathing or heart rate.
• Subliminal perception: the perception of stimuli below the threshold of conscious awareness, often investigated through subliminal priming techniques.
• Experiential consciousness: the subjective experience of being aware of one's thoughts, feelings, and sensations.
• Meta-consciousness (aka meta-awareness): the awareness of one's own thoughts and mental processes.

Mind Wandering and Meta-Awareness

• Mind wandering: the spontaneous shifting of attention from the task at hand to unrelated thoughts or mental imagery.
• Relationship between mind wandering and consciousness: mind wandering reflects fluctuations in the level of consciousness.
• Research study on self-caught vs. probe-caught mind wandering: self-caught mind wandering is associated with better task performance compared to probe-caught mind wandering, indicating differences in awareness and control.

Sensory Memory

• Definition: Large capacity, same modality as experience, and very fast decay.
• Span of Apprehension: Refers to the amount of information one can apprehend or take in at a glance.
• Measurement: Often measured by briefly presenting a set of items (e.g., letters or digits) and determining how many items can be accurately reported.
• Importance: Highlights the limited capacity of sensory memory.

Methods to Study Sensory Memory

• Sperling Partial Report Paradigm: Measures the capacity and duration of sensory memory.
• Diloilo Missing Dot Technique: Studies visual sensory memory by revealing how visual information persists over time.

Function of Sensory Memory

• Acts as a buffer for stimuli received through the senses, retaining impressions long enough for relevant details to be extracted and processed.
• Issues: Limited functionality, difficulty in distinguishing from other stages of memory, and determining precise mechanisms involved.

Echoic Memory

• Definition: The auditory counterpart to visual sensory memory, responsible for holding auditory information for a short period.
• Measurement: Often assessed using tasks where participants must recall auditory stimuli presented briefly.
• Comparison: Lasts longer (2-4 seconds) than iconic memory (less than 1 second) but both serve as initial stages in the memory process.

Short-Term Memory (STM) and Long-Term Memory (LTM) Distinctions

• Neurocognitive Evidence:
  • HM (Milner) had no transfer to long-term memory.
  • Clive Wearing had no transfer to long-term memory.
  • JB had impaired short-term memory.
• Behavioral Evidence:
  • Brown/Peterson paradigm demonstrates the duration limits of STM.
  • Serial position curve reveals primacy (LTM) and recency (STM) effects.
  • Speed of presentation, delay, and interference affect STM.
• Neuroimaging Evidence: Different brain areas are activated during recall, supporting distinct processing mechanisms.

Atkinson and Shiffrin's Model

• Describes memory as a flow of information through sensory registers, STM, and LTM.
• Evidence: Rundus' rehearsal technique showed that rehearsal improves recall, supporting the model.
• Limitations: Oversimplifies memory processes and doesn't account for findings like implicit memory or deeper processing effects.

Depth of Processing

• Concept: Refers to the idea that memory retention depends on the depth (semantic meaning) rather than the type (e.g., visual, auditory) of processing.
• Shallow vs deep processing: Shallow involves surface-level features, while deep involves semantic meaning.
• Experimental evidence: Craik and Tulving showed better recall for semantically processed words compared to shallowly processed ones.
• Importance: Deep processing enhances retrieval cues and memory connections by focusing on the meaning.

Working Memory Approach

• Model: Proposed by Baddeley and Hitch, consisting of multiple components including the central executive, phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, and episodic buffer.
• Central Executive: Oversees and coordinates cognitive processes.
• Cognitive Load: Refers to the amount of working memory resources required by a task.
• Phonological Store: Handles verbal and auditory information.
• Visual-Spatial Sketch Pad: Manages visual and spatial data.
• Episodic Buffer: Integrates information across domains.

Big Picture Conclusions

• Memory Filtering: Most information in sensory memory does not reach short-term memory, and most short-term memory content does not transition into long-term memory.
• Working Memory: Like a computer's RAM or a desktop workspace, working memory is where active processing occurs, involving components like the visual-spatial sketchpad and phonological store.
• Sensory Memory Types: Both sensory and working memory consist of multiple types distinguished by sensory modality, such as visual sensory memory (iconic) and auditory sensory memory (echoic).

Aspects of Long-Term Memory

• Long-term memory has three aspects: encoding, retention, and retrieval
• Encoding: processing and storing information in long-term memory
• Retention: holding onto information over time
• Retrieval: accessing stored information from long-term memory

Encoding

• Depth of processing is important for how long information is held in memory
• Self-reference effect: information related to oneself is better remembered due to deeper processing
• Generation effect: actively generating information from one's own mind improves encoding and retention
• Schemas: cognitive frameworks that help organize and interpret information in long-term memory
• Bransford and Johnson's experiments: providing context or a schema before presenting information enhances comprehension and recall
• Dual code theory: information is better remembered when encoded both visually and verbally

Retention

• Spacing effect: learning is more effective when study sessions are spaced out over time
• Passage of time: memory can fade over time due to decay or interference
• Sleep: plays a crucial role in memory consolidation, strengthening and stabilizing long-term memories
• Post-event information: new information can influence the availability of previously encoded information

Retrieval

• State dependent memory: memory retrieval is most effective when an individual is in the same physiological state as when the memory was encoded
• Mood dependent memory: memory retrieval is enhanced when an individual's mood at the time of retrieval matches their mood during encoding
• Context dependent memory: memory retrieval is improved when the context present at encoding and retrieval is the same
• Context dependent memory in real-world settings: using structured recall formats can enhance memory retrieval
• Impact of schemas on long-term memory retrieval: schemas can facilitate or hinder retrieval

False Memories

• Loftus misinformation study: false memories can be created through suggestion
• Verbal overshadowing: describing a visual memory can impair the ability to recall the original visual information
• Deese Roediger Mcdermott paradigm: demonstrates how people can recall false memories
• Jenkins Demo: shows how primacy and recency effects influence memory
• Debate regarding recovered memories of abuse: controversy surrounds the accuracy of recovered memories and the role of therapeutic techniques in their creation

Metacognition and Memory Strategies

Metacognition

• Meta-cognitive knowledge: understanding what one knows
• Meta-cognitive experience: conscious cognitive or affective experiences related to intellectual tasks

Metamemory

• Types of metamemory judgments:
  • Predicting future memory performance
    • At encoding (judgments of learning): assessing how well material is being learned during study
    • Ease of learning: estimating how difficult it will be to learn new material
  • Paired associative judgments: assessing the likelihood of remembering paired items
  • At retrieval (tip of the tongue): experiencing a feeling that a word or concept is on the tip of one's tongue

Source Monitoring

• Assessing the source of one's memory:
  • Source monitoring judgments
  • Reality monitoring: distinguishing between internal and external memories
  • Internal vs. internal: distinguishing between different internal sources (e.g., said vs. thought)
  • External vs. external: distinguishing between different external sources (e.g., source a vs. source b)

Processing Types

• Systematic processing: careful deliberation about source
• Heuristic processing: automatic, low-level processing of source
• Factors influencing source monitoring performance:
  • Distinguishability depends on similarity
  • Easier to distinguish internal from external sources when things are very different

Memory Improvement Strategies

Encoding Principles

• Transfer to LTM:
  • Using mnemonic devices like acronyms
• Rehearsal: repeating information to keep it in short-term memory
• Generation effect: generating one's own examples or questions based on study material
• Depth of processing: creating meaningful associations with the information
• Self-reference effect: connecting new information to one's own life and experiences
• Multiple codes: using both visual and verbal cues to learn information
• Schemas: organizing information into categories and subcategories
• Distinctiveness: highlighting unique or unusual aspects of the material

Retention Interval Principles

• Delay: testing oneself after varying time intervals to reinforce memory
• Judgments of learning: regularly assessing how well one has learned the material
• Spacing effect: distributing study sessions over several days
• Interference: reducing interference by studying different subjects separately

Retrieval Principles

• Encoding specificity: studying in the same environment where one will be tested
• Associative memory structures: creating mind maps that connect related concepts
• Schematicity: using an overarching structure or storyline to remember facts

Specific Techniques for Memory Improvement

• Keyword mnemonic: associating a familiar word or image with a new term or concept
• Link system: creating a story or linking items together in a sequential manner
• Method of Loci: visualizing items to be remembered in specific locations within a familiar environment
• Rhymes: using rhyming words or phrases to aid memory
• Catch phrases: creating memorable phrases or sayings that encapsulate information
• List order acronyms: creating an acronym from the first letters of a list of items

Prospective Memory

• Definition: the ability to remember to perform a planned action or intention at the appropriate future time
• Example: remembering to take medicine at a specific time each day

Improving Prospective Memory

• Implementation intentions: creating specific plans about when and how one will achieve a goal
• Example: setting a specific plan to remember to call a friend after work

Definition of Mental Imagery

• Mental experience of seeing, hearing, touching an object in the absence of any sensory input.

History of Mental Imagery

• Binet's use of patients with brain damage helped in the study of mental imagery.

Imagining and Brain Activity

• Imagining a movement activates motor processing.
• Imagining a form or color draws on object recognition or color systems.

The Perky Effect

• Participants imagined an object while fixating on a blank screen and believed they were imagining the projected images rather than actually perceiving them.

Dual Coding Hypothesis

• There are two codes in the brain, one verbal and one visual (Paivio).
• Supporting evidence:
  • Memory for concrete words is better than for abstract words.
  • Visual imagery interferes with other visual tasks.
  • Verbal tasks interfere with other verbal tasks.
  • Visual imagery does not interfere with verbal tasks.

Propositions vs. Images

• Propositions: Abstract, essential meanings that do not resemble what they stand for (e.g., "A canary is a bird").
• Images: Resemble what they stand for (analog code).
• Analog view: Information is stored as images, and images are functional in thinking (Kosslyn).
• Propositional view: Information is stored as propositions, and images are "epiphenomenal" (Pylyshyn).

Evidence for the Debate

• Relative image size: Reaction time to identify features is longer when the object is imagined next to a larger object.
• Relative distances: Scanning time between objects in a mental image is proportional to the distance between them.
• Rotation: Reaction time to determine if objects are the same is proportional to the amount of rotation required.

Limitations to Imagery

• People struggle to recall specific details of a common object (e.g., a penny).
• Images cannot always be reinterpreted.

Imagery and the Brain

• Same brain areas are active when viewing and imagining letters (Farah).
• Mental rotation activates the parietal cortex proportional to the angle of rotation.
• Brain damage affecting vision also impacts imagery.

Cognitive Maps

• Definition: Internal representations of the environment used for navigation, staying oriented, and giving directions.
• Example: Navigating through a familiar city or building.
• Developed: Learned from maps and direct experience in the environment.
• Used for: Navigation, staying oriented, and giving directions.
• Accuracy: Often inaccurate due to systematic simplifications.

Organizing Principles of Cognitive Maps

• Rotation heuristic: Tilted structures remembered as horizontal/vertical.
• Alignment heuristic: Structures remembered as more "lined up".
• Hierarchical representations: Locations influenced by larger regions.
• Border Bias: Distances seem greater when crossing borders.

Individual Differences in Cognitive Maps

• Route representations vs. Survey representations.
• Spatial ability and sense of direction: Differences in navigation strategies and accuracy, assessed by tools like the Santa Barbara Sense-of-Direction Scale.

Episodic and Semantic Memory

• Episodic memory: A person's memory for specific events that were personally experienced, e.g., recalling what happened during the last football game that you attended.
• Semantic memory: A mental thesaurus organized knowledge a person possesses about words and other verbal symbols, e.g., knowing that football is a sport.

Characteristics of Semantic Memory

• Allows us to organize objects according to concepts, e.g., seeing and identifying a microphone.
• Enables us to make inferences going beyond the information given, e.g., assuming that the microphone is used by professors who give lectures.
• Enables us to decide which objects are similar.

Theories of General Knowledge

Defining-Attribute Theory

• Concepts are represented by a list of defining attributes.
• Concepts are organized into networks, where related concepts are connected.
• Concepts are represented as nodes, and the relationships between them are represented as links.
• Supporting evidence: Hierarchical organization observed in semantic memory, and reaction time studies showing that people respond faster to items that are closely related in the network.
• Challenges: Typicality effects, where typical instances of a category are responded to more quickly than atypical instances.

Feature Analytic Approach

• Defining features: Necessary features of a category, e.g., birds lay eggs.
• Characteristic features: Typical but not necessary characters of a category, e.g., birds fly.
• Deals with typicality effects by acknowledging that not all features are equal in their importance for category membership.

Prototype Theory

• Prototypes: Idealized representations of a category that embody its most typical features.
• Three levels of prototypes:
  • Superordinate: Very broad categories, e.g., animal, plant, tool.
  • Basic level: Levels at which categories are represented that contain the most useful information, e.g., cat, tree, saw.
  • Subordinate: Highly specific examples, e.g., Siamese cat, elm, hacksaw.
• Support for the 3-level approach: Experimental evidence shows that basic level categories are psychologically privileged and that people tend to categorize items at this level more frequently.
• Issues: Difficulty accounting for variability within categories and the role of context in category membership.

Exemplar Theory

• Exemplars: Specific instances or examples of a category that are stored in memory.
• Differs from prototype theory: Exemplar theory suggests that instead of forming an abstract prototype, people store individual instances of categories and make category judgments by comparing new instances to these stored examples.
• Issues: Implausible that people remember every example of every category, and can become computationally expensive as the number of exemplars grows.

Prototype Theory vs. Exemplar Theory

• Prototype theory: More suitable when dealing with abstract or less familiar categories.
• Exemplar theory: More suitable when dealing with categories that have clear, concrete instances and when there is variability within categories.

Schemas

• Schemas are cognitive structures that organize knowledge and expectations about specific domains.
• Guide our attention, interpretation, and memory of events or experiences.
• Bartlett's War of Ghosts study demonstrates how schemas influence memory and cognition.
• Impact of schemas on memory selection: Schemas influence what information is encoded, stored, and retrieved from memory, leading to memory distortions and biases.

Linguistic Relativity

• Linguistic relativity is the idea that language influences thought processes and perceptions.
• Whorfian hypothesis has three versions:
  • Strong Hypothesis: Language determines thinking.
  • Weak Hypothesis: Language influences perception.
  • Weakest Hypothesis: Language influences memory.

Psycholinguistics

• Psycholinguistics is the study of the psychological aspects of language, including processing, production, and understanding.
• Subfields of psycholinguistics include:
  • Phonology: Study of speech sounds and their function in language.
  • Morphology: Study of the internal structure of words.
  • Semantics: Study of meaning in language.
  • Syntax: Grammatical rules governing word order and sentence structure.
  • Pragmatics: Understanding of social rules underlying language use.

Chomsky's Approach to Psycholinguistics

• Chomsky's approach involves:
  • Deep structure vs surface structure.
  • Transformational rules: Rules for converting between deep and surface structures in language.
• Challenges to his approach include:
  • Not all aspects of his theory are supported, such as processing time for sentences requiring transformations.

Factors Affecting Comprehension

• Negatives: Require more processing time and can lead to errors.
• Passive Voice: More difficult to understand compared to active voice.
• Ambiguity: Slows down comprehension as multiple interpretations are considered.
• Complex Syntax: Nested structures tax working memory, making understanding more challenging.

Neurolinguistics

• Aphasia: Difficulty in communication due to brain damage affecting language areas.
• Types of aphasia:
  • Wernicke's Aphasia: Fluent speech with meaningless content.
  • Broca's Aphasia: Meaningful speech with grammatical deficits.
• Hemispheric specialization:
  • Left Hemisphere: Superior in language abilities.
  • Right Hemisphere: Superior in processing metaphor, humor, emotional tone.

Eye Fixations and Reading

• Eye fixations correspond to the amount of time spent processing each word during reading.
• Factors that affect eye fixations:
  • Word frequency.
  • Ambiguity.
  • Sentence complexity.
  • Reader's cognitive load.
• Mind-wandering impacts gaze duration:
  • Decreased gaze duration indicates shallower processing.

Dual Route Approach to Reading

• Direct-Access Route: Recognizing words visually without phonetic decoding.
• Indirect-Access Route: Recognizing words by sounding them out phonetically.
• Factors that influence route usage:
  • Word characteristics (e.g., frequency, familiarity).
  • Reader expertise (e.g., reading skill level).

Implications for Teaching Reading

• Phonics approach (indirect access):
  • Emphasizes teaching children to decode words by sounding them out phonetically.
  • Evidence supports this approach for children with reading difficulties.
• Whole-word approach (direct access):
  • Emphasizes teaching children to recognize whole words by sight rather than decoding them phonetically.
  • Research suggests that relying solely on whole-word instruction may not be effective for all children, particularly those with reading difficulties.
• Current compromise: Balanced approach incorporating both phonics instruction and whole-word recognition strategies.

Reading Comprehension

• Definition: Understanding and extracting meaning from written text.
• Factors that encourage drawing inferences:
  • Working-Memory Capacity: Individuals with larger working-memory capacities tend to be better at drawing inferences.
  • Expertise: Readers with expertise in a particular subject matter or domain are more likely to draw accurate and meaningful inferences.
  • Meta-comprehension skills: Self-awareness and monitoring of one's comprehension process.

Enhancing Meta-Comprehension Skills

• Strategies include:
  • Self-explanation.
  • Summarization.
  • Making predictions.
  • Questioning the text.

Decision Making

• Decision making: The process of assessing information and choosing among two or more alternatives.
• Two models for decision making:
  • Prescriptive Models: Describe the best way to make a decision, often involving weighing all outcomes and considering pros and cons.
  • Descriptive Models: Describe how decisions are actually made, focusing on real-world decision-making processes.

Classical Decision Theory and Satisficing

• Classical Decision Theory: Assumed decision makers knew all options, understood pros and cons, and rationally made choices to maximize value.
• Satisficing: Aims to obtain an outcome that is good enough, rather than searching endlessly for the optimal solution.

Individual Differences in Decision-Making Style and Psychological Well-being

• Satisficers vs maximizers:
  • Maximizers tend to examine as many options as possible, leading to choice overload.
  • Satisficers settle for satisfactory outcomes.

Decision Making Heuristics

• Representativeness heuristic:
  • Judging the likelihood of an event based on similarity to a population.
  • Role of sample size: Larger sample sizes are statistically more likely to reflect the true proportions in a population.
• Availability heuristic:
  • Making judgments based on how easily instances come to mind, influenced by media and vividness.
  • Role of media and vividness: Media tends to report extraordinary or sensational events, making them more memorable and accessible in people's minds.
• Anchoring and adjustment heuristic:
  • Starting with an initial guess and adjusting based on additional information.
  • Role of presentation order: The order in which information is presented can influence the anchoring effect.
• Framing effect:
  • How the wording of a question influences decision making.
• Overconfidence:
  • Unrealistic optimism about abilities, judgments, and skills.
• Planning fallacy:
  • The tendency for individuals to underestimate the time, costs, and risks involved in completing a future task or project.
• Hindsight bias:
  • Believing that they would have predicted an outcome after it has already occurred.

Problem Solving

• Definition of Problem Solving: The process of reaching a goal when the solution is not immediately obvious.
• Two types of problem solving:
  • Well-defined Problems: Clear steps to reach a solution, explicit parameters and constraints.
  • Ill-defined Problems: Vague steps, lack of clear parameters or constraints, subjective and open to interpretation.

Components of Problem Solving

• Initial State: The starting point of the problem-solving process, where the problem is identified and the current situation is understood.
• Goal State: The desired outcome or solution that the problem solver aims to achieve.
• Obstacles: Challenges, constraints, or barriers that hinder progress from the initial state to the goal state.

Representation of Problems

• Matrices: Grids showing all possible combinations of items, useful for complex, stable, categorical information.
• Diagrams: Represent abstract information in a concrete fashion, reducing complex information into a tangible form.
• Analogy Use: Employing better-understood problems to solve new problems by recognizing similarities at a deep level.
• Means-End Analysis/Heuristics: Strategies not guaranteed to be correct but generally helpful, involving identifying the desired goals and figuring out the means to reach them.

Hill Climbing Technique

• Choosing steps that move closest to the goal, but can lead to getting stuck in local maxima.
• Solutions: Backtracking or adding randomness may be necessary to overcome local maxima.

Factors that Influence Problem Solving

• Expertise: Specific memory skills, speed, accuracy, and metacognitive skills.
• Mental Set: Tendency to use the same solution from previous problems, which can hinder flexibility.
• Functional Fixedness: Assigning stable uses to an object, limiting creative problem-solving.

Insight vs Non-Insight Problems

• Insight Problems:
  • Solutions seem to come suddenly, often after a period of apparent impasse.
  • Involves a sudden restructuring of the problem representation leading to a solution.
• Non-insight Problems:
  • Solutions are reached through gradual, systematic problem-solving strategies.
  • Involves logical reasoning and the application of known problem-solving techniques.

Right/Left Hemisphere Differences and Insight Problems

• Insight problem solving involves increased activity in the right hemisphere of the brain, particularly in the right temporal lobe.
• Right hemisphere activation may be associated with holistic processing, pattern recognition, and sudden shifts in problem-solving strategies.

Effects of Physical Distance and Temporal Distance on Insight

• Greater physical or temporal distance from a problem can enhance insight problem solving.
• Physical distance can lead to a more abstract representation of the problem, facilitating novel insights.
• Temporal distance encourages a broader perspective and may help individuals overcome mental fixation on previous problem-solving attempts, allowing for fresh insights.

Definition of Cognition and Cognitive Approach

• Cognition refers to mental activity, including the acquisition, storage, transformation, and use of knowledge.
• The cognitive approach to psychology emphasizes people's thought processes and their knowledge.

Origins of Cognitive Psychology

• Introspection, an early approach to studying mental activity, involved trained observers analyzing their own sensations and reporting them objectively.
• Wundt's introspection technique is now considered subjective, not objective, by most cognitive psychologists.

Early Memory Researchers

• Ebbinghaus examined factors that influence performance on memory tasks, such as the amount of time between two presentations of a list of items.
• Calkins reported the recency effect, where recall is especially accurate for the final items in a series of stimuli.
• Calkins emphasized the importance of studying cognitive processes in the real world, rather than in artificial laboratory tasks.

Behaviorism

• Behaviorism focuses on objective, observable reactions to stimuli in the environment.
• Behaviorists, such as Watson, emphasized observable behavior and studied nonhuman animals.
• Tolman provided evidence that learners create mental representations of their environment based on their experiences.

Gestalt Psychology

• Gestalt psychology emphasizes that humans actively organize what they see, see patterns, and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Cognitive Revolution

• Piaget believed that children actively explore their world to understand concepts and their cognitive strategies change as they mature.
• Chomsky argued that humans have an inborn ability to master language and its complex structures.

Empirical Research and Ecological Validity

• Empirical evidence refers to scientific evidence obtained by careful observation and experimentation.
• Ecological validity is a principle of research design that uses conditions similar to the natural setting where the results will be applied.

Connectionist Approach and Cognitive Neuroscience

• The connectionist approach describes cognitive processing in terms of networks that link together neuron-like units, performing operations simultaneously and in parallel.
• Cognitive neuroscience uses research techniques from cognitive psychology and neuroscience to study mental activity and the brain.

Computer Metaphor of the Mind

• The computer metaphor of the mind describes cognition as a complex, multipurpose machine that processes information quickly and accurately.

Visual and Auditory Recognition

• Perception: the process of using previous knowledge to gather and interpret stimuli registered by the senses, involving both bottom-up and top-down processing.
• Object recognition: the process of identifying a complex arrangement of sensory stimuli and perceiving it as separate from its background.

Visual System

• Distal stimulus: the actual object in the environment, e.g., a pen on a desk.
• Proximal stimulus: the information registered on sensory receptors, e.g., the image of a pen on the retina.
• Sensory memory: a large-capacity storage system that records information from each sense with reasonable accuracy.
• Iconic memory: a brief preservation of an image of a visual stimulus after it has disappeared.

Primary Visual Cortex and Occipital Lobe

• Primary visual cortex: located in the occipital lobe of the brain, concerned with basic processing of visual stimuli, and the first place where information from both eyes is combined.

Figure-Ground Relationship

• A perceptual phenomenon where the figure and ground of a visual stimulus reverse, making the figure become the ground and vice versa.

Illusory/Subjective Contours

• The perception of edges in a visual stimulus even though they are not physically present.

Feature-Analysis Theory

• Distinctive features: important characteristics of a visual stimulus, e.g., shape, color, and texture.
• Recognition-by-Components theory: proposes that people recognize 3D shapes by identifying simple 3D shapes called geons, which can be combined to form meaningful objects.

Top-Down vs Bottom-Up Processing

• Top-down processing: emphasizes the importance of concepts, expectations, and memory in object recognition, e.g., recognizing a word in a sentence.
• Bottom-up processing: emphasizes stimulus characteristics in object recognition, e.g., recognizing individual letters in a word.

Face Recognition

• Gestalt: an overall quality that transcends individual elements in a stimulus.
• Prosopagnosia: the inability to recognize human faces visually, while other objects may be perceived normally.
• Face-inversion effect: people are more accurate in identifying upright faces compared to upside-down faces.

Speech Perception

• Phoneme: the basic unit of spoken language, e.g., sounds a, k, and th.
• Word boundaries: the perception of clear boundaries between words in a language, which can be affected by variability in phoneme pronunciation.
• Variability in phoneme pronunciation: includes interspeaker variability, imprecise production, and coarticulation.
• Phonemic restoration: filling in a missing phoneme based on contextual meaning.
• McGurk effect: the influence of visual information on speech perception, combining both visual and auditory information.
• Special mechanism vs general mechanism theories: debating whether speech perception involves a specialized device or uses the same neural mechanisms as other auditory stimuli.

Attention

• Attention is a concentration of mental activity that can be divided into two types: divided attention and selective attention.
• Divided attention involves paying attention to two or more simultaneous messages, responding appropriately to each message.
• Selective attention requires people to pay attention to certain kinds of information while ignoring other present information.

Measuring Selective Attention

• Dichotic listening is a laboratory technique that presents one message to the left ear and a different message to the right ear to measure selective attention.
• The Stroop task/effect measures selective attention by asking people to name the ink color of a word that may have a conflicting meaning.
• The Stroop task has been modified to study eating disorders and emotional responses.

Visual Search

• Visual search is a task that requires finding a target in a visual display with numerous distractors.
• The isolated-feature/combined-feature effect in visual search research shows that people can locate an isolated feature more quickly than a combined feature.
• The feature-present/feature-absent effect shows that people can locate a feature that is present more quickly than a feature that is absent.

Brain Imaging and Theories of Attention

• PET scans (Positron Emission Tomography) measure blood flow in the brain to study cognitive tasks.
• Bottleneck theories of attention (e.g., Broadbent filter theory; Treisman’s Filter amplitude theory) propose a narrow passageway in human information processing that limits the quantity of information to which one can pay attention.
• Feature-integration theory proposes two elements: distributed attention (fast, low-level processing of all parts of the scene simultaneously) and focused attention (slower serial processing of each item in the scene, one at a time).

Consciousness

• Consciousness is a person's awareness of the external world and of their own perceptions, images, thoughts, memories, and feelings.
• Mind-wandering occurs when a person's thoughts shift away from the external environment, and they begin thinking about another topic.
• Thought suppression can lead to ironic (rebound) effects of mental control, where people's efforts to control the contents of consciousness can backfire.

Other Concepts

• Blindsight is a condition in which an individual with a damaged visual cortex claims not to see an object but can accurately report some characteristics of the object.
• Mindfulness meditation is a form of meditation that encourages focusing on inward and outward experiences on a moment-to-moment basis.

Defining Short-Term and Long-Term Memory

• Short-term memory holds a small amount of information a person is actively using, also known as working memory.
• Long-term memory has a large capacity and stores experiences and information accumulated throughout one's lifetime.

Limits of Short-Term Memory

• Brown/Peterson & Peterson Technique: a technique to study short-term memory, where participants are presented with items, perform a distracting task, and then recall the original items.
• Serial position effect: a U-shaped relationship between a word's position in a list and its probability of recall, with better recall for initial and final words.
• Primacy and recency effects: tendencies for items at the beginning and end of a list to be recalled better than items in the middle.

Atkinson-Shiffrin Model of Information Processing

• Proposes that memory involves a sequence of separate steps, with information transferred from one storage area to another.
• Sensory memory: a large-capacity storage system that records information from each sense with reasonable accuracy.
• Short-term memory: memories are fragile and can be lost within 30 seconds unless rehearsed.
• Long-term memory: has an enormous capacity, stores memories decades old, and information is relatively permanent.

Control Processes and Limitations of the Model

• Control processes: intentional strategies, such as rehearsal, used to improve memory.
• Concerns about the model: sensory memory is now considered a brief storage process, and the distinction between short-term and long-term memory is questioned.

Working Memory Approach

• Working memory: a brief, immediate memory for limited material that a person is currently processing, which also coordinates ongoing mental activities.
• Components of working memory:
  • Phonological loop: processes a limited number of sounds for a short period.
  • Visuospatial sketchpad: processes visual and spatial information.
  • Central executive: integrates information and plays a role in attention, planning, and coordinating cognitive activities.
  • Episodic buffer: a temporary storehouse that combines information from other components.

Characteristics and Applications of Working Memory

• Active process: working memory is an active process where information is manipulated and transformed.
• Limited capacity: similar to short-term memory, with information lasting up to 30 seconds.
• Connection with long-term memory: controversy over whether working memory and long-term memory are separate systems.
• Applications:
  • Academic performance: working memory tasks are correlated with overall intelligence, grades, and reading ability.
  • Clinical populations: working memory deficits are observed in depression, ADHD, and anxiety.

Long-Term Memory

• Long-term memory is a high-capacity storage system that contains memories for experiences and information accumulated throughout a lifetime.
• It consists of three main types: episodic, semantic, and procedural memory.

Episodic, Semantic, and Procedural Memory

• Episodic memory: recalls personal experiences and events that happened to an individual personally.
• Semantic memory: stores organized knowledge about the world, including factual information and knowledge about words.
• Procedural memory: involves knowing how to perform tasks, such as riding a bicycle or sending an email.

Encoding and Retrieval

• Encoding: the initial acquisition of information, where information is processed and represented in memory.
• Retrieval: the process of locating information stored in long-term memory and accessing it.

Levels/Depth of Processing

• A theory proposing that deeper, meaningful processing of information leads to more accurate recall than shallow, sensory kinds of processing.
• Deeper processing often leads to extracting more meaning from a stimulus.

Elaboration and Distinctiveness

• Elaboration: rich processing emphasizing the meaning of a concept and relating it to prior knowledge and interconnected concepts.
• Distinctiveness: a stimulus is different from other memory traces.

Self-Reference Effect

• According to this effect, individuals will remember more information if they try to relate that information to themselves.

Encoding Specificity Principle

• The observation that recall is often better if the context at the time of encoding matches the context at the time of retrieval.

Recall and Recognition Tasks

• Recall task: participants must reproduce items learned earlier, such as defining a term.
• Recognition task: participants must judge whether they saw an item earlier, such as recognizing a word.

Explicit and Implicit Memory Tasks

• Explicit memory task: participants are instructed to remember information, and later intentionally retrieve it.
• Implicit memory task: an indirect measure of memory, where previous experience with material facilitates performance on a later task.

Amnesia and Anxiety Disorders

• Retrograde amnesia: loss of memory for events prior to brain damage.
• Anterograde amnesia: inability to form memories for events after brain damage.
• Individuals with anxiety disorders remember threatening words more accurately than those without disorders.

Autobiographical Memory and Source Monitoring

• Autobiographical memory: recalling personal experiences and events.
• Source monitoring: identifying the origin of a memory, such as distinguishing between real and imagined events.

Flashbulb Memory and Eyewitness Testimony

• Flashbulb memory: memory for circumstances surrounding a surprising and emotionally arousing event.
• Factors influencing eyewitness testimony accuracy:
  • Schema-consistent memories
  • Source monitoring errors
  • Post-event misinformation
  • Stressful circumstances
  • Delay between event and testimony
  • Plausibility of misinformation
  • Social pressure
  • Positive feedback

Post-Misinformation Effect

• Exposure to misleading information after an event can distort an eyewitness's memory, leading to inaccurate testimony.

Special Topics in Long-Term Memory

• Memory experts: memory can be improved through practice and specific strategies in specific contexts.
• How do novices and experts differ? Experts possess a well-organized knowledge structure, reorganize new material, and rehearse strategically.
• Own-ethnicity bias: tendency to more accurately recognize faces of one's own ethnic group.
• Emotion and memory: the Pollyanna principle states that people tend to rate unpleasant past events more positively with time.

Memory Strategies

• Memory strategies are intentional, goal-oriented mental activities to improve encoding and retrieval of information in memory.
• The total-time hypothesis states that the amount of information learned depends on the total time devoted to learning, but quality of study strategies is also important.
• The distributed-practice effect shows that spaced learning (distributing practice over time) is more effective than massed learning (practicing all at once).

Effective Learning Strategies

• Desirable difficulties involve learning situations that are challenging but not too difficult, which can increase long-term recall.
• The testing effect shows that taking a test can boost long-term recall for academic material.
• Spaced learning is a more effective learning strategy than massed learning.

Mnemonics

• Mnemonics are mental strategies designed to improve memory.
• There are two types of mnemonics: those using mental imagery (e.g., visualizing a piano chewing toast) and those using organization (e.g., chunking, hierarchy).
• Examples of mnemonics include the keyword method, chunking, hierarchy, first-letter technique, and narrative technique.

Types of Memory

• Retrospective memory refers to remembering things that happened in the past.
• Prospective memory is remembering to do something in the future, typically focused on action.

Memory Aides and Metacognition

• An external memory aid is a device that facilitates memory, such as a to-do list.
• Metacognition refers to knowledge and control of cognitive processes.
• Metamemory is a type of metacognition that refers to knowledge, monitoring, and control of memory.

Metacognition and Metamemory

• The foresight bias is the tendency to be overconfident about performance on a future exam.
• Immediate metamemory estimates are often inaccurate, but delaying estimates can improve accuracy.
• Research on metamemory explores factors that influence metamemory and regulation of study strategies.

Related Phenomena

• The tip-of-the-tongue effect is the subjective experience of knowing a target word but being unable to recall it.
• The feeling-of-knowing effect is the subjective experience of knowing some information but being unable to recall it.

Metacomprehension

• Metacomprehension is a type of metacognition that refers to thoughts about language comprehension, often focused on reading comprehension.
• Research shows that college students often exhibit low levels of accuracy in metacomprehension, overestimating their understanding of text content.
• Strategies to improve metacomprehension include active reading, repeated readings, and self-assessment and self-management of reading strategies.

Mental Imagery

• Definition: Mental representation of stimuli when they are not physically present in the environment
• Examples: Visual imagery, auditory imagery, and mental representation of any sensory experience

Differences between Mental Imagery and Perception

• Perception: Involves immediate processing of sensory input from the environment through sensory organs
• Mental Imagery: Involves internally generated mental representations of sensory experiences without direct sensory input

Mental Rotation Tasks

• Purpose: Measure mental imagery
• Findings: Reaction time increases linearly with the angle of rotation (Shepard and Metzler, 1971)
• Replication: Similar results found with various stimuli, confirming the angle-reaction time relationship

Research Findings Related to Mental Rotation

• Age Differences: Elderly perform slower on mental rotation tasks (Beni et al., 2006)
• Deaf Individuals: Skilled in mental rotation due to ASL experience (Emmorey et al., 1998)
• Cognitive Neuroscience: Mental rotation tasks engage the parietal lobe, especially the right parietal cortex

The Imagery Debate

• Controversy: Do mental images resemble perception (analog code) or language (propositional code)?
• Analog Code: Representation that closely resembles the physical object, maintains spatial relationships
• Propositional Code: Abstract, language-like representation, storage is neither visual nor spatial

Research Supporting Each Side of the Debate

• Analog Code:
  • Mental imagery closely resembles physical objects (Kosslyn et al., 2006)
  • Mental rotation studies show that reaction times increase with the degree of rotation (Shepard and Metzler, 1971)
  • Neuroimaging shows that visual imagery tasks activate the same brain regions as visual perception (Ganis et al., 2009)
• Propositional Code:
  • Mental images are stored as abstract, language-like representations (Pylyshyn, 2003, 2006)
  • Propositional code does not vary with the amount of rotation

Factors that Influence Visual Imagery

• Distance and Shape Effects:
  • Distance Effects: Mental image scanning takes longer for greater distances (Kosslyn et al., 1978)
  • Shape Effects: Judgments about mental images of shapes mimic patterns observed with real objects (Paivio, 1978)

Interference with Physical Stimuli

• Interference with Visual Perception:
  • Mental images can interfere with processing actual physical images (Segal and Fusella, 1970)
  • Imagining a visual image can distort judgments about the orientation of a real line segment (Mast et al., 1999)

Cognitive Maps

• Definition: Mental representation of geographic information, including a person's surrounding environment
• Relationship to Spatial Cognition:
  • Spatial cognition refers to thoughts about cognitive maps, remembering the world we navigate, and keeping track of objects in a spatial array

Distance and Shape Effects on Cognitive Maps

• Border Bias: People tend to estimate the distance between two locations on different sides of a geographic border as larger than two locations the same distance apart but on the same side of a geographic border
• Landmark Effect: People tend to provide shorter distance estimates when traveling to a landmark rather than a non-landmark
• 90-degree-angle-heuristic: People tend to remember a figure that is slightly tilted as being either more vertical or more horizontal than it really is

Position Effects on Cognitive Maps

• Rotation Heuristic: People tend to remember a figure that is slightly tilted as being either more vertical or more horizontal than it really is
• Alignment Heuristic: People tend to remember a series of separate geographic structures as being more lined up than they really are

Prototype Theory of Semantic Memory

• Organize categories based on a prototype, the best representative of a category
• Characteristics of prototypes:
  • Typicality effect: Judge typical items (prototypes) faster than non-typical items (non-prototypes)
  • Example: Judging "robin" as a bird faster than "penguin"
• Family resemblance: No single attribute shared by all examples of a concept, but each example shares at least one attribute with another example
  • Example: Chair, table, and sofa share attributes like being used for sitting, having legs, or being in a living room

Levels of Categorization

• Superordinate-level categories: Higher-level or more general categories (e.g., "furniture", "animal", "tool")
• Basic-level categories: Moderately specific categories (e.g., "chair", "dog", "screwdriver")
  • Characteristics of basic-level categories:
    • Used to identify objects (e.g., saying "pen" instead of "Paper Mate gel pen")
    • Produce the semantic priming effect (e.g., responding faster to "apple" after hearing "fruit")
    • Activate different regions of the brain
• Subordinate-level categories: Lower-level or more specific categories (e.g., "desk chair", "collie", "Phillips screwdriver")

Exemplar Theory of Semantic Memory

• Classify new stimuli by comparing it to multiple known exemplars in a category
• Differ from prototype theory, which compares new stimuli to a single prototype
• Example: Categorizing a new bird by comparing it to specific remembered birds (e.g., robins, sparrows, eagles, and penguins)

Network Models of Semantic Memory

• Propose that semantic memory consists of a netlike organization of concepts with interconnections
• Differ from categorization models, focusing on interconnections among related items
• Concepts are represented as nodes, with activation spreading to nearby or related nodes
  • Example: The concept "apple" interconnected with nodes like "fruit", "red", "sweet", and "tree"

Schemas and Scripts

• Schemas: Generalized knowledge about a situation, event, or person, allowing predictions about new situations
• Scripts: Simple, well-structured sequences of events in a specified order
  • Example: A script for visiting a doctor's office might include waiting, filling out forms, and consulting the doctor
• Schemas influence understanding and memory, and serve as building blocks for representing thoughts about people

Memory Integration and Schemas

• Memory integration: Using background knowledge to incorporate new information into memory in a schema-consistent manner
  • Example: Integrating information about the flightless kiwi bird into a pre-existing bird schema
• Research on memory integration:
  • Bartlett's "War of the Ghosts" study: Demonstrated reconstruction of memories based on cultural expectations and prior knowledge, leading to distortions and omissions
  • Research on gender stereotypes: Showed that individuals tend to remember information in a way that is consistent with societal gender norms, perpetuating stereotypical beliefs.

Definition of Psycholinguistics and Key Terms

• Psycholinguistics is an interdisciplinary field that examines how people use language to communicate ideas.
• Phoneme: The basic unit of spoken language, with approximately 40 phonemes in the English language.
• Morpheme: The basic unit of meaning in language, with each segment conveying meaning.
• Morphology: The study of morphemes, examining how words are created by combining morphemes.
• Syntax: The grammatical rules that govern how words can be combined into sentences.
• Semantics: The area of psycholinguistics that examines the meanings of words and sentences.
• Pragmatics: The social rules and world knowledge that allow speakers to successfully communicate messages to other people.

Early Theories of Psycholinguistics

• Chomsky's approach: Humans have an inborn, universal grammar that allows them to produce and understand sentences they have never encountered before.
• Surface structures vs deep structures: Surface structures represent a sentence based on the words spoken or written, while deep structures represent the underlying, abstract meaning of a sentence.
• Research in opposition to Chomsky: Many non-European languages do not exhibit universal grammatical patterns, challenging the notion of a shared underlying structure.
• Cognitive-functional approach: The idea that the function of human language is to communicate meaning to other individuals in everyday life.

Methodologies in Psycholinguistics

• Negation and passive voice: Studying comprehension of sentences with negation or passive voice reveals insights into how people understand complex linguistic structures.
• Incremental interpretation: Examines real-time language understanding, showing how meaning is built incrementally as words are encountered.
• Self-paced reading task: Reveals the timing of language processing and strategies for handling syntactic and semantic ambiguities.
• Lexical ambiguity: A type of ambiguity that arises because a word has multiple meanings.
• Syntactic ambiguity: Investigates sentences with multiple interpretations due to ambiguous syntax.
• Eye-tracker: Tracks participants' eye movements during reading or listening, providing detailed information about attention allocation, ambiguity resolution, and information integration.

Definition of Neurolinguistics and Language Disorders

• Neurolinguistics: The discipline that examines how the brain processes language.
• Language disorders: Broca's aphasia (expressive-language deficit) and Wernicke's aphasia (severe problems with language comprehension) provide insights into neurolinguistics.
• Broca's area: Damage to this area causes Broca's aphasia.
• Wernicke's area: Damage to this area causes Wernicke's aphasia.

Hemispheric Specialization and the Mirror System

• Hemispheric specialization/lateralization: Each hemisphere of the brain has somewhat different functions.
• The mirror system: A network involving the brain's motor cortex, suggesting that language comprehension might involve the simulation of observed actions in the brain's motor cortex.

Written and Spoken Language

• Written language comprehension differs from spoken language in its visual nature, control over input rate, ability to rescan, standardized input, clear word boundaries, and lack of nonverbal cues.
• Written language requires more elaborate teaching for children's mastery.
• Despite differences, both written and spoken language involve understanding words and sentences, with a strong correlation between reading and oral comprehension in adults.
• Adults typically learn new words more quickly in written form than in spoken form.

Dual-Route Approach to Reading

• Dual-route approach: The proposal that skilled readers use both a direct-access route and an indirect-access route to recognize words during reading.
• Direct-access route: When a word is recognized directly through vision, without "sounding out" the word.
• Indirect-access route: When letters are translated into sound before the word and its meaning can be accessed.

Approaches to Teaching Reading to Children

• Whole-word approach: The proposal that readers can directly connect the written word with the meaning.
• Phonics approach: The proposal that readers recognize words by trying to pronounce ("sounding out") the individual letters in the word.
• Whole-language approach: The idea that reading instruction should emphasize meaning and be enjoyable.

Problem Solving and Creativity

Defining Problem Solving

• Problem solving: Processes used to reach a specified goal when the solution is not immediately obvious
• 3 components of problem solving: initial state, goal state, and obstacles
• Example: Need to reach Jim tonight, but don't know his last name, email, or phone number (initial state) → goal state: have Jim's last name and email address

Relationship between Attention and Problem Solving

• Scanning strategically helps in problem solving
• Paying attention to specific details or parts of the problem helps solve it faster

Methods of Problem Representation

• Symbols: Using symbols to represent abstract problems, like algebraic equations
• Matrices: Grids of rows and columns showing possible combinations of items
• Diagrams: Visual representations to understand abstract information or problem structures
• Visual Images: Mental representations of visual information or simulations used in problem-solving

Situated and Embodied Cognition

• Situated cognition: Using information in the immediate environment or situation
• Embodied cognition: Using the body and motor actions to express abstract thoughts and knowledge
• Examples: Using landmarks to guide way, and waving hand to remember a word

Problem Solving Strategies

• Algorithm: Method that will always produce a solution, but can be inefficient
• Heuristic: General rule or problem-solving strategy that usually produces a correct solution
• Exhaustive search: Algorithm that tests all possible answers
• Analogy approach: Using a solution to a similar problem to help solve a new problem
• Means-ends heuristic: Dividing the problem into subproblems and reducing the difference between the initial state and goal state
• Hill-climbing heuristic: Choosing the alternative that seems to lead most directly toward the goal

Factors that Influence Problem Solving

• Expertise: Impressive memory abilities or consistently exceptional performance in a particular area
• Knowledge base: Specialized and extensive domain-specific knowledge and schemas
• Memory: Highly specific and detailed memory retrieval abilities of experts
• Problem-solving strategies: Systematic and efficient approaches utilized by experts
• Speed and accuracy: Rapid and precise problem-solving performance exhibited by experts
• Metacognitive skills: Ability to monitor, evaluate, and regulate problem-solving processes

Insight vs Non-Insight Problems

• Insight problem: Problem-solving situation with an initial block, then a sudden solution
• Non-insight problem: Problem solved gradually, using memory, reasoning skills, and routine strategies

Metacognition during Problem Solving

• Research shows different metacognitive patterns for insight and noninsight problems

Creativity

• Generating solutions that are both novel and useful
• Intrinsic motivation enhances creativity, while extrinsic motivation decreases it

Decision Making and Deductive Reasoning

• Decision making is the process of assessing information and choosing among two or more alternatives, and it is more ambiguous than deductive reasoning.
• Deductive reasoning involves making a conclusion based on specific premises and logical principles.

Decision-Making Heuristics

Representativeness Heuristic

• A general rule used to judge the likelihood of an outcome based on the similarity between the sample and the population.
• Leads to the small-sample fallacy, assuming a small sample represents the population.
• Example: Assuming a restaurant always has poor service based on two bad experiences.

Base-Rate Fallacy

• Ignoring the importance of base rate (frequency of an item in the population) when making a decision.
• Example: Thinking air travel is very dangerous due to a news report, despite statistics showing it is safer than driving.

Conjunction Fallacy

• Judging the probability of two events to be greater than the probability of either individual event.
• Example: Believing someone is more likely to be a teacher and a part-time musician than just a teacher, based on their love of music.

Availability Heuristic

• Estimating frequency or probability based on how easily examples come to mind.
• Example: Overestimating the probability of car theft due to recent news stories.

Recency Bias

• Estimating frequency or probability based on the most recent information available.
• Example: Overestimating the danger of air travel after a recent plane crash.

Familiarity Bias

• Estimating frequency or probability based on how familiar you are with something.
• Example: Underestimating the prevalence of heart disease due to greater familiarity with cancer stories.

Recognition Heuristic

• Choosing the option you recognize over the one you don't, assuming the recognized option is more frequent.
• Example: Choosing a recognized brand of cereal over an unknown one, assuming it is more popular.

Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic

• Beginning with a first approximation and making adjustments based on additional information.
• Example: Estimating the result of a math problem differently based on the order of the numbers.

Ecological Rationality

• A description of how people create heuristic strategies to make adaptive choices in real-world contexts.
• Emphasizes context-specific adaptation of decision-making strategies, unlike the heuristic approach.

Framing Effect

• When decisions are influenced by the background context or the way a question is worded.
• Example: Preferring a treatment with a 90% survival rate over one with a 10% mortality rate, despite identical information.

Overconfidence in Decision Making

• When confidence judgments are higher than actual performance.
• Factors that increase overconfidence include uncertain assumptions, confirmation bias, and difficulty in recalling alternative hypotheses.

Hindsight Bias

• The belief that an event was inevitable and predicted after it has already happened.
• Example: Claiming to have known a team would win a sports championship after the event.

Maximizers and Satisficers

• Maximizers: People who examine many options instead of settling for a satisfactory one.
• Satisficers: People who settle for a satisfactory option instead of examining many options.