Introduction to Cognitive Psychology (Best, 1999)
What are the 3 levels of analysis?
The Mental, the Neural, and the Cognitive.
Psychological essentialism is a cognitive bias that oversimplifies and distorts…
Please respond with a True or False answer.
True.
How does the article define a “map”?
A recording of metric associations among properties of the world.
What leads to face-source memory errors?
Bond et al found that the encoding process of prototypical faces may lead to a face-source memory error.
What is Ulric Neisser's definition of cognitive psychology?
Cognitive psychology refers to all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used.
What is object history?
The conceptual capacity for an object to be represented by its “invisible” past, rather than just observable features.
What is the difference between within and between-routes in the study?
Within-route = Buildings that are traveled between directly because they were learned along the same initial route.
Between-route = Buildings that are never directly traveled between.
What influences our motivation towards specific social goals?
The degree to which we think of stimuli as social targets is influenced by our motivation towards a particular social goal.
What are the two likely implications for elaboration by our cognitive system?
1. Elaboration can lead to a better understanding of the material.
2. Elaboration can be context-dependent, which can impact later learning and retrieval.
What is an example from the article of how a low-frequency regularity could be expressed with generics?
"Mosquitos carry the West Nile Virus", although only 1% actually do.
Based upon cognitive capacities, integrators and non-integrators both outperform imprecise navigators on what 2 measures?
Verbal and spatial working memory measures.
What does previous literature show about how negative biases work?
They operate on an involuntary cognitive level despite attempts to seem racially unbiased.
Briefly summarize the study conducted by Bonebakker et al 1996, as well as the primary finding.
Summary: Participants given several lists of words both preoperatively and intraoperatively; given a word-completion where participants were given the first few letters of a word presented under anesthesia.
Finding: Subjects were significantly more likely to complete the word stem with the letters of a word presented during the operation than they were to complete it with the letters from a distractor word.
What were the 3 implications for how children learn?
1. Abstract and placeholder representations can structure how knowledge is represented and built.
2. Highlights the importance of learning from others.
3. The ability to reason about nonobvious aspects of the world can be a driver of intellectual development.
What were the 3 groups defined by the virtual-reality paradigm? Briefly explain their performances.
Integrators, Nonintegrators, and Imprecise Navigators.
Integrators = Perform well on both within-route and between-route judgments, successfully forming a global cognitive map.
Nonintegrators = Learn individual routes well but struggle to relate them to each other (poor between-route performance).
Imprecise Navigators = Perform relatively poorly on both types of spatial judgments, though still above chance levels.
How did demand characteristics play a role in the results of experiment 1?
It is also possible that demand characteristics wherein participants did not want to appear biased or prejudiced impacted some results.