final exam Flashcards

Question

opposing views of language development (BF Skinner, Noam Chomsky, critical period)

Answer 1

B.F Skinner’s view - Language is learned through operant conditioning using punishment and reward Noam Chomsky’s view - Language is biologically detrmined; Our brains are hardwired for a language, despite what it is - Language acquisition device; a hypothetical language organ in the brain; findings that the brain is prewired for language at birth; all children make similar grammatical mistakes– universal grammar ; yet to find a specific region in the brain that is resposinsible for acquiring language CRITICAL PERIOD: language development is maximized early in life

Answer 2

1) PRENATAL - Language develops before birth - Newborns show preference for mother’s voice (already starting the process of language learning when they hear mother’s voice) 2) BABBLING ~ 6 months - vocalization that lacks meaning - Produce and repeat single syllables trying to communicate - Babies exploring the noises they can make and exercising their vocal apparatus - Strengthening motor control of their voices - Fine tuning their ears to hear language differences 3) COMPREHENSION VS PRODUCTION - Children comprehend basic language rules before being able to produce them - e.g. they may understand that the word elephant refers to a big grey animal with a long trunk, but they have limited ability to coordinate sounds to produce this word 4) FIRST WORDS ~ 1 year - Still produce and repeat single syllabi/words - Holophrases: single word utterances often carry larger and more complex meanings - E.g. child says “up” to convey that they wished to be picked up 5) TELEGRAPHIC SPEECH~ 2 years - Simple sentences (e.g. “me up” instead of “up”) - Over generalization of rules (over applying language rules to many situations where there are exceptions) - e.g. toddlers applying phoneme of “ed” to words that don’t express past tense (e.g. “I goed there” instead of “I went there”) 6) CONVERSATIONS ~ 4-6 years - Clear understanding of rules (grammar and syntax) - Between ages of 1-5/1-6 years, language develops from the use of single words into more complex sentences and expanded vocabulary

Answer 3

COGNITIVE ECONOMY: resources allocated to thinking and decision making - allows us to simplify what we deal with to a manageable minimum - allows us to keep the information we need for decision-making to a manageable minimum - Allows balance between the resources used to make small decisions and big decisions, making sure we have enough resources/currency for the decisions that are huge/life altering - i.e. fast thinking HEURISTICS: mental shortcuts to simplify decisions (making fast decisions) - Enhances our survival - Heuristics can sometimes lead us astray– oversimplification OVERSIMPLIFICATION: incorrectly attributing a quality to a person/situation - E.g. when climbing a mountain, if we rely on heuristics to tell us to just go straight up without any decisions/thoughts about food, water, best paths, the dark, weather, etc. (decisions that require cognitive economy), we can run the risk of getting into a dangerous sitation

Answer 4

Derived by Tversky & Kahneman SYSTEM 1 THINKING: Brains automatic/intuitive/unconscious way of thinking (auotpilot) - Fast and automatic thinking - Necessary for survival - Require little energy & saves lots of cognitive economy - E.g. tying your shoes, understanding simple sentences/math, knowing someone is being hostile toward you, forming a first impression of someone based on their appearance - Allows us to make simple associations between things - E.g. associating Paris with the country of France, learning associations through classical conditioning - PRO: is usually intuitively accurate based on your feelings - E.g. assessing somebody in a short amount of time and predicting the longevity of relationships with little time observing them - CON: basing decisions off the way you feel/your snap judgments will not always be beneficial when making decisions - E.g. making a decision on buying stock in a car company needs serious research, etc. SYSTEM 2 THINKING: Brains analytical/slow/controlled way of thinking - Slow and systematic thinking - Considers all options - Requires a lot of energy - E.g. think about walking faster than normal, looking for a person in a crowded train station, checking for spelling mistakes in an assignment, checking the validity of a complex logical argument, forcing yourself to be calm wehn you’re infuriated There must be a balance between using system 1 and system 2 thinking - We need to know how and when to counteract our own fast intuitions, personal biases, and heuristics that can put us in danger of making hasty decisions with well planned thinking

Answer 5

REPRESENTATIVENESS HEURISTIC: judging the probability of an event based on similarity/prototype (how prevalent it was in the past) - Make decisions based on how representative something is - E.g. a jury trying to deliberate whether or not a defendant is guilty dependant on how well that person represents a criminal in their mind plays a huge role. System 1 thinking suggests that iIf the defendant appears to look like a criminal, then they are one. - E.g. we might say it’s intuitively right that Steve, who is described as very shy, helpful, meek, organized, and withdrawn, is a librarian rather than a farmer because he’s more representative of our image of a librarian than he is of our image of a farmer BASE RATES: how common something is - In representative bias, we tend to ignore base rates and rely on how representative a person/something is to the prototype - E.g. base rates tell us that male farmers are more common than male librarians, but our representative heuristic believes Steve to be a librarian - System 2 thinking can try to override the represnetativeness heuristic that humans naturally use - E.g. Linda can be one thing, another thing, or the combination of both, based on a description. Without knowing the base rate, one can note that the probaability that a given person has two specific qualities is lower than the probability of them having one specific quality.

Answer 6

AVAILABILITY HEURISTIC: estimating the likelihood of something happening based on how easily it comes to mind or how “available” it is in our memories - Influenced by news or global events - Perceived importance of an issue is related with the ease of memory retrieval (things you know more about are perceived to occur more often than issues you know less about) - E.g. most people are afraid of flying a plane than driving a car– even though car fatalities are much more common, because of the increased attention to airplane crashes in the media which makes the negative aspects of flying more available in our memories than the dangers of driving, increasing our fear of airplanes - E.g. more people have fear of sharks than they do of cattle– event houghc battle are more likely to kill you, because the information of shark attacks is more readily available in the media and therefore more readily available in our memories Availability heuristics bias/shape our view of the world all the time - E.g. Trump addressed immigration as a very prominent issue in the 2016 election, and as a result, because that information was so salient in the minds of the Trump supporters, they believed that the issue of immigration was the most pressing concern - E.g. the side effects of the covid vaccine got lots of attention in the media, and people overestimated the risks and believed its more common than it was

Answer 7

HINDSIGHT BIAS: overestimating how well we would have predicted something after it occurred - People only see things clearly after the event has occurred - E.g. on a test, if you got a question wrong because you were uncertain and guessed, you might think to yourself “ugh I knew that was wrong” - When we have hindsight bias, things that were unexpected appear no longer surprising because you convinced yourself that you knew it from the beginning - E.g. you knew your team was going to win only after they won, you knew the stock price would go down but only after you didn’t invest

Answer 8

We make decisions based on how well concepts represent what they should We use what’s available to us to assign importance to things or how often they should occur We frequently justify to ourselves that we were right all along but only after an event happened System 2 thinking can override problematic thinking and make logical/rational decisions by knowing base rates & probabailities of what is truly likely, being aware of what is available & what information is limiited, and by acknowledging we can be wrong about predictions We need a fast system to help us throughout the day, but beware of the limitations and heuristics that we use and use system 2 thinking to cross checl your beliefs

Answer 9

FRAMING: how information is presented to you (e.g. gains/losses) affects decisions - E.g. raffle ticket problem: Vendor A tells you that 1 of 5 tickets wins, and vendor B tells you that 80% of tickets are duds. Even though the outcome is the same in both situations (20% chance of winning), you are more likely to choose vendor A because of the way it’s presented (vendor A framed the raffle in terms of how often you win) - E.g. “you will save $__” instead of “you will spend $__”)

Answer 10

DISTRACTION BY IRRELEVANT/COMPETING INFORMATION: Failure to focus on the important stuff - E.g. math problems with unnecessary information MENTAL SETS: Getting caught-up in a particular problem solving strategy - Dont see alternatives/dont think outside the box - E.g. using a - b - 2c wont work on all problems - E.g. only restarting when your computer glitches but it doesn’t work; look at other solutions FUNCTIONAL FIXEDNESS: Difficulty perceiving an object being used for something other than what it was designed for and not seeing all possible uses for an object - E.g. affix a candle to the wall using only a tack and candle; use the box the tack’s came in as a platform to hold the candle

Answer 11

TRIAL AND ERROR: - Searching different solutions until it words ad problem is solved - Commonly used - E.g. if restarting your phone doesnt fix your phone glitches, then try clearing your storage ALGORITHM: - Step by step solving formula - Must be followed exactly to produce correct result - Systemic - E.g. following algorithmic solving approach when assembling an ikea set HEURISTIC: - Shortcut for problem solving using mental models (e.g. schemas) - General problem solving approach - Rule of thumb - Work most of the time, but not all the time - E.g. travelling to a foreign country and need internet; your heuristic here is to solve the problem of Wifi by going to the centre of town where busy intersections are so you can find a coffee shop and get free wifi; you understand through experience that coffee shops have free wifi DIVIDE AND CONQUER: - Break down large complex problems into smaller more manageable problems - E.g. solving a long math equation by breaking it down into smaller parts - E.g. cutting bread into gradually smaller pieces to get equal pieces INSIGHT: - The sudden recognition of a solution to a problem - The “A-ha!” moment - E.g. a chimp gains insight on how to get food after sitting for a while and thinking MEANS-END ANALYSIS: - Reaching a major end goal by managing smaller goals along the way, while also adjusting and planning based upon intermediate steps and changes - A form of divide and conquer - E.g. setting sub-goals (writing down dates of each assignment) to help reach goal (realistic schedule) when starting a new semester - E.g. the Tower of Hanoi

final exam Flashcards

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