Visual Imagery and Memory

• Visual imagery occurs when seeing in the absence of a visual stimulus.
• Analog images mimic the structure of the environment.
• Propositional images have an arbitrary relationship to the environment's structure.
• Image-based representations preserve spatial relationships and support mental rotation and scanning.
• Propositional representations are better for abstract reasoning and language.
• Changes in the mode of representation alter the pattern of information availability.
• General knowledge affects mental imagery.
• Perception (bottom-up) and imagery (top-down) indicate people possess good visual memories.
• Memory depends on relevant knowledge and connections.
• Duel-coding theory proposes separate verbal/propositional memory and image-based non-verbal memory.
• Concrete words can be encoded by both systems.
• Abstract words can only be encoded by propositional memory.
• Memory for pictures is generally better than memory for words.
• In an imagery and perception study, participants found it difficult to process both simultaneously.
• During binocular rivalry, when 2 different images are presented at once, visual systems struggle to process both.
• Aphantasia is a condition where people lack visualization capacity.

System 1 (Intuition)

• Fast and automatic processing.
• Frequently emotional and subconscious.
• Heuristic-based decision-making.
• System 1 or 2 depends on the context of the decision and problem presented.
• Attribute substitution involves using past memories to make judgments for current situations.
• Availability heuristic involves using availability as a substitute for frequency.
• Heuristics gain efficiency but lose accuracy.
• The representativeness heuristic uses resemblance instead of probability to pass judgment.
• Anchoring is relying on the 1st piece of information given when making decisions or judgments.
• People overestimate their future feelings.
• Frontal cortex damage impairs emotion and reward regulation.
• Ventromedial PFC damage leads to poor performance on deck tasks.
• Confirmation bias: seeking confirmation for personal biases rather than actual facts.
• Base-rate information is often ignored.
• Framing impacts decision making (choice in losses leads to risk-seeking, choice in gains leads to risk aversion).
• Covariation involves assessing the relationship between variables.
• Participants asked to recall fewer events deemed themselves more assertive.

System 2 (Reasoning)

• Slow and effortful.
• Logical and calculating.
• Relies on working memory with basis of intelligence
• Requires more deeper analysis

Category

• Categories are sets of things treated equivalently for some purpose.
• Concepts are mental representations of all members of a category.

Classical Theory

• Classical theory states that concepts are definitions in the head represented like a dictionary.
• A list of sufficient and necessary features defines concepts and a category.

Prototype Effects

• More typical representations elicit faster response times.
• Hybrids of classical and prototype views involve a core used for judging and a prototype aspect used for intuition.
• Dynamic categories group items by their relevance to achieving a particular objective and can be influenced by situational goals/needs.
• A correlation exists between family resemblance and category membership.

Explanatory Theories

• Focus on causal understanding, essential properties, predictive power, and learning/adaptation in categorization.
• Casual beliefs help explain why certain features are characteristic of that category, forming implicit theories.
• Category membership cannot be based on resemblance alone.

Language-Related

• Language isn't the same as written language.
• English does not differentiate between aspirated and unaspirated sounds.
• Babies lose all language phonemes.
• Coarticulation involves adjacent phonemes containing information about each other.
• Morphemes are usually composed of multiple phonemes.
• The Wug test (Gleason) studies how children acquire and apply linguistic rules.
• Children don't just memorize words but understand linguistic rules.
• Chomsky's idea of innate language faculty is supported.
• Top-down effects are based on unconscious interference using prior knowledge to fill in missing information.

Semantics and Pragmatics

• Bottom-up processing is not solely relied on.
• Context significantly increases identification if sentences are spliced.
• The McGurk effect demonstrates speech perception is based on multiple sources

Generativity

• Capacity to generate endless combinations of words.
• Syntax is learned naturally without explicit teaching.
• Ambiguous sentences have multiple syntactic trees.
• Garden path sentences involve an initial interpretation of a sentence that is usually wrong.
• Prosody involves patterns of pauses and pitch changes in speech production.
• Gricean Maxims differentiate questions and statements.
• Pragmatics: intended meaning, Maxims, prosody.

Quality and Innate Language

• Nativism (Chomsky, Pinker): innate, humans are born with cognitive modules for certain skills.
• Poverty of stimulus and lack of negative evidence support this theory.
• Empiricism (Elman, Tomasello): learned through experience, "blank slate", domain-general learning.
• Animal language limited support generativity
• FOX P2 causes severe speech and language disorder.
• Birds generate and learning birdsong
• Broca's area: impairs production/intact comprehension
• Wernicke's area: fluent but nonsensical/impaired comprehension