Psychology Unit 3 Flashcards
Why do scientists think that the evolution of language and evolution of the brain were intertwined?
because the development of fully grammatical language is a monumental and unusual step, as our ancestors moved from protolanguage to grammatical language they required brains with greater working memory and a capacity for abstract thought
What are the principles of language development discussed in the book?
the ability to understand words develops slightly before the ability to produce words, neural commitment - young infants can discriminate phonetic sounds outside of their language where a few months later they can no longer do that meaning the neural networks in brain’s language center wire it to commit to one language
What do we know about the babbling stage of language development in humans? How is it defined? When does it end?
sounds made as a result of the infant’s experimentation with a complex range of phonemes, including consonants and vowels (starts at 5-6 months old and ends around 12 months), make more sounds than they hear in native language and can hear more sounds than their parents
What is mnemic neglect?
a pattern of selective forgetting in which autobiographical memories are easier to recall if they are consistent with positive self concept
What is the twaddling and cooing stage of language development?
first sounds humans make other than crying, consisting of mainly vowels, during first 6 months of life
When do babies express one-word utterances?
at 12 months
What do we mean when we say that children employ the recency effect when learning languages?
the tendency to learn the last word in a sentence first
after neural pruning and neural wiring reach their peak, the plasticity of neural connections becomes less flexible
According to Uylings (2006), what happens after neural pruning and neural wiring reach their peak?
the plasticity of neural connections becomes less flexible
What is the optimal learning time for language acquisitions?
the first years of your life until about age 12
How can you best describe child-directed speech?
changes in adult speech patterns - apparently universal - when speaking to young children or infants; characterized by higher pitch, changes in voice volume, use of simpler sentences, emphasis on here and now, and use of emotion
According to the book, what is Skinner’s belief on language? What terms does he use to explain the progression of language development in children from birth until the age they are able to utter short phrases and sentences?
language exists because it is reinforced and shaped and that we speak not because we want to convey an idea or feeling but because we have been reinforced into doing so. Skinner explains the progression of language development in children as shaping (successive approximations and reinforcement)
What is the central tenet of the nativist theory?
we discover language rather than learn it, that language development is “native”, or inborn, the brain is structured for language learning
How would you describe the language acquisition device?
an innate, biologically based capacity to acquire language, proposed by Noam Chomsky as part of his nativist view of language
What are Chomsky’s views on language development?
nativist, we are not born with a capacity to learn a particular language but rather we are born with a capacity to learn language, single universal grammar underlying all human languages
For what reason does linguist Noam Chomsky argue for a built-in language acquisition device (LAD)?
how easily and automatically humans learn to do a very complex and difficult thing (speak in complete and grammatical sentences)
Describe the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis? What are the basic tenets of this theory?
language creates thought as much as thought creates language - language shapes our thoughts and perceptions to such an extent that people who speak languages that lack a common foundation have difficulty directly communication and translating their ideas from one language to the other
Describe the linguistic determinism hypothesis? What are the basic tenets of this theory?
our language determines our way of thinking and our perceptions of the world, if there are no words for certain objects or concepts in one’s language it is not possible to think about those objects or concepts
What is linguistic relativism?
the language we speak influences but does not determine how we think
What are mental representations?
a structure in the mind - such as an idea or image - that stands for something else, such as an external object or thing sensed in the past or future, not the present (more about things we sensed in the past)
How is visual imagery defined in the book?
visual representations created by the brain after the original stimulus is no longer present
How is visual perception described in the book?
actually perceiving an image, occurs while stimulus is still present
What are the differences between visual perception and visual imagery?
visual perception occurs while perceiving an image, visual imagery occurs after the original stimulus is no longer present
Which hormone plays a key role in determining the ability to perform better on tests of spatial ability for men, women, and animals?
High levels of testosterone and low levels of estrogen are associated with higher scores on spatial tasks
What are categories and prototypes?
Category - classification created by perceiving similar features in objects, ideas, or events and treating them as if they are the same
Prototypes - best-fitting examples of a category (ie robin is better for bird category than ostrich)
How is a concept defined in the book? Why are they useful?
mental grouping of objects, events, or people, help us to organize our perceptions of the world
According to the book, what is the importance of concept hierarchy?
an arrangement of related concepts in a particular way, with some being general and others being specific, helps us order and understand our world
What is inductive and deductive reasoning? How do they both differ from each other? Which of these two is linked to the confirmation bias and casual inferences?
- Inductive reasoning - reasoning general conclusions from specific evidence, causal inferences and confirmation bias
- Deductive reasoning - reasoning from general statements of what is known to specific conclusions (ie All humans are mortal. Socrates is human. Therefore, Socrates must be mortal.)
How is confirmation bias and casual inferences defined in the book?
causal inferences - judgements about causation of one thing by another, confirmation bias - tendency to selectively attend to information that supports one’s general beliefs while ignoring information or evidence that contradicts one’s beliefs
What is the rational choice theory?
when given a choice between two or more options, humans will choose the one that is most likely to help them achieve their particular goals
According to book what evidence challenges rational theory?
people make economic decisions based on intuition rather than rational choice
Define verbal, spatial, quantitative intelligences?
- Verbal intelligence - ability to solve problems and analyze information using language-based reasoning
- Spatial intelligence - ability or mental skill to solve problems such as navigating and visualizing objects from different angles
- Quantitative intelligence - ability to reason and solve problems by carrying out mathematical operations and using logic
How did Charles Spearman to arrive at his theory of intelligence?
came to this conclusion after research consistently showed that specific dimensions, or factors, of intelligence were correlated strongly with one another, suggesting they all measured pretty much the same thing, includes verbal intelligence, spatial intelligence, and quantitative intelligence
Why is Spearman’s theory known as a g-factor theory? What does the g-factor theory imply?
intelligence is a single general (g) factor made up of specific components, implies that this single number accurately reflects a person’s intelligence - the higher, the better (ie IQ of 115 better than 100)
How are Cattel’s fluid and crystallized intelligences defined? How do they differ from each other?
- Cattell’s fluid intelligence - raw mental ability, pattern recognition, and abstract reasoning that can be applied to a problem one has never confronted before
- Crystallized intelligence - kind of knowledge that one gains from experience and learning, education, and practice, more stable over time: Influenced by culture, experience, and environment
What is the Raven’s Progressive Matrices Test used for?
measure of fluid intelligence
What is matrix reasoning? Why it is considered as a fluid intelligence?
Matrix reasoning is fluid intelligence, because it does not depend on acquired knowledge and involved the ability to find patterns, matrix reasoning measures visual processing and abstract, spatial perception
What are the component of crystallized intelligence?
- General intelligence
- Broad intelligence - includes abilities such as crystallized and fluid intelligence, memory, learning, and processing speed
- Narrow intelligence - includes many distinct abilities (ie speed of reasoning and general sequential reasoning for fluid intelligence and reading, spelling, and language comprehension for crystallized intelligence)
How does human intelligence change across the lifespan?
crystallized intelligence improves until middle age and begins to dip after age 65, abstract intelligence peaks during your 20’s
When does abstract intelligence peak?
during your 20’s
What are the three components of Sternberg’s triarchic theory of intelligence?
1)Analytic - judging, evaluating, or comparing and contrasting information (ie ap person deciphering meaning of an uncommon word from its context in a sentence)
2)Creative - coming up with fresh and useful ideas for solving problems
3) practical intelligence - solve problems of everyday life efficiently, “street” knowledge
What are the components of Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences?
1)Naturalistic- ability to recognize, classify and understand plants and animals in one’s environment (ie biologists)
2)Interpersonal intelligence - ability to perceive and understand other people’s intentions, emotions, motives, and behaviors (social workers, psychologists)
3)Bodily-kinesthetic - ability to use one’s body or parts of it to solve problems or create products (athletes, mechanics)
4)Spatial - ability to think about and solve problems in 3D space (navigators, architects)
5) Intrapersonal - ability to be aware of, understand, and regulate one’s own behavior, thoughts, feelings, and motivations (ie psychologists)
6) Musical - ability in performing, composing, or appreciating musical patterns (musicians, song-writers)
7) Logical -mathematical - ability to analyze information and problems logically and to perform mathematical operations (scientists, engineers)
8) Linguistic ability to learn, understand, and use both spoken and written language (poets, writers, lawyers, politicians)
define the concept of mental age? Who develop this concept?
equivalent chronological age a child has reached based on his or her performance on an IQ test, developed Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon developed this test
What procedure does William Stern use to determine a person’s intelligence score?
intelligence ratio (named Stanford-Binet test) - mental age (MA) is divided by chronological age (CA) and multiplied by 100 to determine an intelligence score (aka intelligence quotient (IQ))
What was Lewis Terman’s contribution to intelligence testing?
established national norms and adopted and applied the ration score of MA/CA to a widely used IQ test
What is the difference between the WISC and the WAIS?
- Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) - measures adult intelligence
- Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) - measures children intelligence
How did the K-ABC differ from the Stanford–Binet and Wechsler tests?
1)first IQ test to be more systematically guided by theories of intelligence (fluid and crystallized intelligence and Piaget’s theory of cognitive development 2)different kinds of problems for children of different ages with varied difficulty 3) measured several distinct aspects of intelligence more explicitly and in a more detailed manner than traditional measures of intelligence 4) assessed different types of learning styles, first intelligence test informed by contemporary ideas about how the brain works and developed
What was an important aspect of intelligence that aided in solving a problem at hand that was not considered in intelligence tests before 1985?
Working memory
In addition to assessing fluid and crystallized intelligence, what does the newest version of the Stanford–Binet test assess?
assesses quantitative reasoning, visual-spatial processing, and working memory
As argued by Sternberg and Gardner, what is a drawback of Wechsler and Stanford–Binet tests?
they measure only verbal, spatial, and mathematical forms of intelligence
What is the criteria used to assess the reliability of an intelligence test?
reliability - consistency of results,
-test-retest reliability - consistency of scores on a test over time
- internal reliability- characteristic of an intelligence test in which questions on a given subtest tend to correlate very highly with other items on the subtest
What is an adaptive behavior?
adjustment to and coping with everyday life (ie how well can a person feed themself)
What is the criteria used to determine intellectual disability?
significant limitations in intellectual functioning as well as in everyday adaptive behavior and the deficits must start before age 18
What do we know about familial-cultural intellectual disability?
occurs when environmental deprivation (neglect and poor nutrition) is to blame for some cases of milder intellectual disability, genetics play no role in this form of disability
How is prodigy defined?
young person who is extremely gifted and precocious in one area (ie math, music, art, or chess) and at least average in intelligence
How is savant syndrome defined?
very rare condition in which people with serious mental handicaps also show isolated areas of ability or brilliance (ie IQ below 70, yet incredible ability for calculating numbers, recalling events, playing music, or drawing)
Which part of the brain is involved in solving the problem?
frontal lobe
What do we know about the interconnectedness of nature and nurture in intelligence?
- People with higher levels of brain connectivity tend to have higher overall IQs than people with lower connectivity ie Connectome (map of all neural networks in the human brain)
- the more closely people are related genetically, the more similar they are in IQ, environment can also enhance a child’s IQ, “nature” accounts for 50% of variability in intelligence among individuals and nurture account for 40% of variability
What is a reaction range?
for a given trait (IQ) the genetically determined range of responses by an individual to his or her environment (ie a reaction range for IQ is 25 points, meaning that a given person may end up scoring anywhere in a 25 point range on an IQ test), a person who was raised in an enriched environment is likely to obtain an IQ score near the upper limit of his or her reaction range
How does the prenatal environment affect the growth of the brain and IQ of a child?
toxins ingested by the mother, either intentionally or unintentionally may influence the child’s intelligence, stress, alcohol, drugs, and viral infections in a pregnant woman can lower her child’s overall intelligence
What is Arthur Jensen’s conclusions regarding IQ?
because IQ is under genetic influence, racial-ethnic differences in IQ must be at least partly genetic in origin
What did Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray conclude in their book ‘The Bell Curve’?
1) racial-ethnic groups vary on IQ scores 2) difference in IQ contribute to differences in education and income, suggest that group differences in IQ and hence in education and income can be explained in part by genetics
According to the book, what is the relationship between gender and intelligence? What are the gender differences described in the book?
Gender and intelligence: most research on overall intelligence and gender has reported no difference between men and women on average
- women more consistently tend to do better than men in writing, reading comprehension ,perceptual speed, and associative memory
- men have better spatial skills and more frequently score at the high or end of the scale on tests of science, math, spatial reasoning, and social studies
In the context of cultural views on intelligence, how do Asian cultures differ from American cultures?
have traditionally emphasized humility, awareness, right conduct, and mindfulness as important qualities of intelligence, western cultures emphasize verbal and cognitive skills first
What is convergent thinking?
problems that have known solutions and require analytic thinking and the use of learning strategies and knowledge to come up with the correct answer
What will an individual applying crystallized intelligence to solve a problem require?
learned strategies and knowledge
What is divergent thinking?
problems that have no known solutions and require novel solutions
What are the three kinds of strategies that people use to solve different kinds of problems?
1) Algorithms - step-by-step procedure or formula for solving a problem
2) Insight - sudden solution that comes to mind in a flash (Eureka Insight)
3) Thinking outside the box - an approach to problem solving that requires breaking free of self-imposed conceptual constraints and thinking about a problem differently in order to solve it
What is functional fixedness?
mindset in which one is blind to unusual uses of common, everyday things or procedures (ie pliers cut things but they could also be used as a weight at the end of a string to cause it to swing like an pendulum)
What is cognitive fixation? How does it affect individuals solving problems?
inability to break out of a particular mind-set in order to think about a problem from a fresh perspective, prevents people from seeing possible solutions (ie not thinking in 3D because they believe it has to be solved in 2D)
What is a mental set? What happens when people develop mental sets?
tendency to continue to use problem solving strategies that have worked in the past, even if better solutions are available
What is creativity?
thinking an/or behavior that is both novel - original and useful - and adaptive
Describe the four stages of creative problem-solving?
1) preparation - involves discovering and defining the problem and then attempting to solve it 2) incubation - putting the problem aside for a while and working on something else 3) insight - a Eureka moment when the solution comes immediately to mind 4) elaboration-verification - the solution needs to be confirmed even if it has the feel of certainty and ins confirmed depending on what task is involved
Why is elaboration-verification undertaken?
the solution needs to be confirmed even if it has the feel of certainty
What do we know about creative insights and creative people?
creative ideas activate frontal and parietal lobe regions of the brain, insights occur in the right hemisphere rather than the left, creative people solving creative problems show more integrated and balanced activity between their right and left frontal lobes
What ideational fluency?
ability to produce many ideas
What test can a person take to assess one’s creativity?
Alternate Uses test measures creativity by J.P. Guilford
Can you name a personality trait commonly found among highly creative individuals?
openness to experience, which is the tendency to enjoy and seek out new experiences, new foods, new places, and new ideas
What disabilities does Rex have?
blind, can’t tie his shoes or dress himself, or carry on a basic conversational
What is a musical savant?
combination of blindness, mental disability, and musical talent
What age was Rex when he first became interested in a keyboard?
2
How common is Rex’s ability to recognize music notes?
1 in 10,000
What is stereotype threat?
people’s perceived risk that they might do something that supports an unfavorable stereotype about their group
What do we mean when we say that stereotype threat is a situational threat?
you could be judged based on a stereotype that you have
Do stigmatized group members need to believe the stereotypes targeting their groups to experience stereotype threat?
Stigmatized group members do NOT need to believe the stereotypes targeting their groups to experience stereotype threat because it can cause them to fear the stereotype and interfere with their academic achievement
How can stereotype threat affect academic performance in women?
Stereotype can affect academic performance in women because when they take a difficult math test the woman taking the test and those seeing the results see the stereotype of women not being good at math as something that is interfering/related to their performance
How do Claude Steele’s experiments with women support stereotype threat’s main argument?
Claude Steele’s experiments with women support stereotype threat’s main argument, because when the stereotype threat was taken out of the situation women were able to more accurately match the skills of the men but when the men were there the stereotype threat occurs
What factors determined that Black students in Steele and Aronson (1995) diagnostic condition would likely experience stereotype threat? What evidence from Study 3 supports this view?
because they were told it was a diagnostic of intellectual ability on verbal ability and there is a stereotype that blacks have low verbal ability, study 3: Blacks who were told the test was diagnostics were more likely to complete the word fragments in black stereotypic ways while those in non diagnostic conditions did not complete word fragments using stereotypic words, Blacks were also more likely to complete word fragment in ways that indicated self-doubt more likely to distance themselves from stereotypically black activities
What are the general features of stereotype threat discussed in the video?
1) stems from situational pressures that bring the stereotype to mind
2) can affect any group for which a negative stereotype exists
3) the nature of the threat varies by the specific context of the negative stereotype
Women - threatened in arena of mathematical ability
Older adults - threatened in the arena of memory
Athletes - threatened on the football field
4) operates by changing the way information is processed - reducing people’s working memory capacity, emotional and cognitive reaction to the possibility of confirming a stereotype about one’s group
What do we learn from Inzlicht and Ben-Zeev (2003) study?
women taking math test in a group with women scored higher on a test than when taking it with mainly men
What do we learn from Croizet and Claire (1998) study?
lower socioeconomic status participants in diagnostic condition - tried fewer items/answered fewer questions and higher socioeconomic status participant were not influence whether the test was of intellectual ability or lexical memory
What conditions are more likely to produce stereotype threat?
more negative stereotypes produce stronger stereotype threat, stronger effects if self-esteem is tied to domain performance, have greater chance for success in area of achievement
According to the video, how does information processing is affected by stereotype threat?
Women - threatened in arena of mathematical ability
Older adults - threatened in the arena of memory
Athletes - threatened on the football field
What was Francis Galton trying to prove with his research on intelligence?
to demonstrate the hereditary basis of intelligence
Originally, what was Alfred Binet’s test designed to assess?
measure intellectual intelligence of school children (to separate normal vs intellectually disabled)
