What was the main limitation of Skinner’s behaviourist explanation of language?
Chomsky showed that one stimulus can produce infinite responses, so language requires internal mental rules, not S-R chains.
What evidence showed behaviourism failed to explain internal mental representations?
People can plan, problem-solve, and use internal representations that behaviourism cannot observe or explain.
Why did attentional limits challenge behaviourism?
Information processing has bottlenecks, showing humans have limited attention not accounted for by S-R learning.
What did Tolman believe guided behaviour instead of S-R chains?
Internal cognitive maps.
What rat maze finding supported Tolman’s idea of cognitive maps?
Rats showed latent learning by navigating efficiently once food was introduced, even without prior reinforcement.
What is the purpose of the additive factors method?
To determine whether different variables affect the same or different processing stages based on whether effects are additive or interactive.
In a memory scanning task, what does a linear increase in RT with set size indicate?
A serial search through items.
How does human memory scanning differ from AI search?
Humans search serially; AI could search in parallel.
What RT pattern indicates parallel search?
No increase in reaction time as set size increases.
Why is introspection unreliable as scientific evidence?
It is subjective, unverifiable, and prone to reasoning errors and biases.
What is the certainty effect?
People overweight outcomes that are certain relative to probabilistic ones.
What is the pseudo-certainty effect?
People treat uncertain outcomes as certain, leading to biased decisions.
Give an example of focused attention reducing processing of other stimuli.
In dichotic listening, people shadow one ear and miss changes in the unattended ear.
What is inattentional blindness?
Failure to notice unexpected stimuli because attention is elsewhere.
What is change blindness?
Failure to detect changes in a visual scene due to limited detail encoding.
What does early selection theory propose?
Filtering occurs before semantic processing.
What does late selection theory propose?
All inputs are processed for meaning; attention controls what reaches awareness.
What is Lavie’s flexible locus theory?
Selection can occur early or late depending on perceptual load.
What example supports late selection?
The cocktail party effect — hearing your name in an unattended channel.
What is endogenous attention?
Voluntary, goal-directed attention.
What is exogenous attention?
Automatic attention capture by salient stimuli.
According to Feature Integration Theory, what requires focused attention?
Binding features together in conjunction searches.
Why are feature searches fast and parallel?
They rely on pre-attentive processing of simple features.
What is infantile amnesia?
Adults rarely recall events from ages 0–4 due to immature memory systems and limited language.
