Week 1

Question 1

What is “Learning”?

Answer 1

A change in mental states that is associated with some environmental or cognitive event.

Question 2

What is “Memory”?

Answer 2

The total, lasting effects of your life experiences.

Question 3

What is “Attention”?

Answer 3

The capacity for managing our limited cognitive
resources, so that we use (and learn) what is most relevant.

Question 4

How does an organism survive (and thrive) in
a complex world that is constantly changing?

Answer 4

Innate or learned biases or constraints tell us what is immediately relevant.

Question 5

What helps bias/constrain aspects of the world?

Answer 5

Attention System

Question 6

What are our eyes drawn to?

Answer 6

Visually salient items - high contrasts or moving

Question 7

What is “bottom-up” process?

Answer 7

Process that happens automatically or innately - no direction or intention

Question 8

What is “top-down” process?

Answer 8

Process that occurs deliberately based on learned experiences, usually when there are multiple visually salient items

Question 9

How does your cognitive system work in the world?

Answer 9

There is a constant integration of bottom-up and top-down information to determine what is relevant.

Question 10

What is indeterminacy of translation?

Answer 10

Situation
“under specifies” a unique meaning

Question 11

How do organisms determine what is relevant to them?

Answer 11

natural biases about stimuli in the environment

Question 12

What is the whole-object constraint?

Answer 12

Young children have a bias for
assuming that labels refer to whole objects, rather than parts of
objects

Question 13

What is taxonomic assumption?

Answer 13

labels can be extended to other objects
of the same kind

Question 14

What are 2 biases?

Answer 14

taxonomic assumption and whole-object constraint

Question 15

What are the properties of biases?

Answer 15

Innate (bottom-up) and help constrain
how words are learned and applied to objects

Question 16

How do cognitive systems tend to overcome
computational complexity?

Answer 16

By using a variety of innate and learned
biases

Question 17

What are species-specific biases?

Answer 17

They reflect an animal’s evolutionary
adaptation to their ecological niche

Question 18

What is the trade-off of species-specific biases?

Answer 18

The trade-off may be reduced
flexibility is responding to new threats

Question 19

Do different cognitive systems(memory, attention, and learning) have different limits and constraints?

Answer 19

Yes

Question 20

What is the purpose of cognitive psychology?

Answer 20

To characterize how each cognitive system
operates, it is helpful to study the biases and tendencies of the
system

Question 21

What is the first reason Donders’ reaction-time experiments were remarkable?

Answer 21

It was the first use of a behavioral measure to infer a mental
process

Question 22

What is the second reason Donders’ reaction-time experiments were remarkable?

Answer 22

Lead to the underlying assumption was that the mental processes were
resource-limited

Question 23

What is the third reason Donders’ reaction-time experiments were remarkable?

Answer 23

The subtraction method put mental events on the same basis as
physical events. You can quantify mental activity