Learning Theory - Thorndike
- Behaviourism
- learn through trial and error about the outcomes
- eg puzzle boxes with cats - had to press a lever to get out
What does “thinking” represent?
The abilities to: reason, judge, reflect, solve a problem, make a decision etc
Issues with Learning Theories - Thorndike
- didn’t explain much
- is it really learning by trial and error?
- or are they learning that there is a relationship between the two (pressing the lever and getting out) - this means there is a cognitive element present
Learning Theories - Köhler
- challenged radical behaviourism
- chimpanzee study
- given a task where they had to reach suspended food
- no opportunity for trial and error
- learned to stack boxes high enough to reach the food
- solved the problem after reflection, not by learning that one thing produced something else
- gained insight into the problem and realised what worked and what didn’t work - COGNITIVE ELEMENT
- rarely made mistakes after successful completion of the task
Name the 2 classes of mental representations
Analogue and Symbolic
What are analogue representations?
Resemble what they represent
Eg a picture / drawing of a shark
What are symbolic representations?
Arbitrary representations of the thing it represents
Doesn’t resemble the actual object
Eg the word ‘shark’
Briefly explain examples of analogue representations
Mental imagery:
a representation of a stimulus that originates in the brain
snapshot picture essentially
(younger children better at this)
Visual Scanning:
- eg memorise a map with different landmarks, close your eyes and focus on a mental image of the map
- given tasks where you have to imagine moving from one landmark to another
- Kosslyn (1978) found that the greater the distance between the two locations on the mental image of the map, the longer it took P’s to scan and find the second location
- this shows that mental images involve a degree of spatial representation
Briefly explain examples of symbolic representations
Network Models and Spreading Activation Model
Network model:
- see if people look at the world in these hierarchical terms
- eg animal splits into bird and fish which further divide and so on
- usually things in higher levels are remembers quicker
Spreading Activation Model
- a model of working memory
- seeks to explain how the mind processes related ideas, in particular semantic or verbal concepts
- vast, interrelated network of concepts
- can be tested using / is associated with priming
Describe Meyer and Schvaneveldt’s (1971) research
- example of semantic priming
- P’s had to decide whether the stimulus presented to them was a word or a non-word
- primed with a word before the stimulus was shown
- measured the reaction times of P’s
- faster responses generated when ‘nurse’ was primed with ‘doctor’ compared to ‘butter’
- this is because ‘doctor’ and ‘nurse’ are semantically related words
What do neuroscientists believe constitutes a thought?
- Arises from the unified activity of different brain areas
- Koch (2004) - of the many brain regions and connecting circuits that are active at any instant, a particular subset becomes joined in unified activity that is strong enough to become a conscious thought or perception
- the specific pattern of brain activity composing this dominant subset varies from moment to moment as we experience different thoughts and as we respond to changing stimuli
What is propositional thought?
- expresses a proposition or statement
What is imaginal thought?
- Consists of images that we can see, hear or feel in our minds
What is motoric thought?
- mental representations of motor movements
- eg throwing an object
What are propositions?
- what most of our thinking occurs as
- statements that express ideas
What are concepts?
- basic units of semantic memory
- mental categories that we place objects, activities, abstractions and events that have essential features in common
- acquired either through explicit instruction or through our own observations of similarities and differences among various objects and events
Rosch (1977) - Prototype view
- many concepts are difficult to define explicitly
- easier to define concepts by PROTOTYPES - the most typical and familiar members of a category or a class
- eg vegetables
- Rosch suggested that we often decide which category / class something belongs to by its degree of resemblance to the prototype
Rips (1997) research
1) is an eagle a bird?
2) is a penguin a bird?
3) is a bat a bird?
- prototype view - quicker decision on 1 than 2 and 3
- b/cause eagle fits most ‘bird’ prototypes than penguins & bats do
- experiments (Rips) measuring how quickly P’s responded yes or no to the preceding questions have found that most people take longer to decide whether penguins or bats are birds
Uses of the prototype view
- most basic and elementary method of forming concepts as we are required to note similarities among objects
- children’s early concepts - new objects are determined by their degree of similarity to prototypes such as “mummy”, “biscuit” or “doggie”
- prototypes differ on personal experience - lots of room for arbitrariness and individual differences
- eg terrorists or freedom fighters?
What does reasoning allow us to do?
- acquire knowledge, make sound decisions and solve problems
- avoids trial and error
- before solving problems, we develop solutions to them in our minds before then applying them to the external world
What is deductive reasoning?
When we reason from the top down
General principles to a conclusion about a specific case
Eg syllogisms - If X is Y and Y is Z, therefore X must be Z
What is inductive reasoning?
When we reason from the bottom up
Start with specific facts and try to develop a general principle
- used when discovering general principles after witnessing a number of specific instances of a phenomenon
- eg Pavlov - when dogs were approached by the experimenter who was about to feed them they started to salivate - thought in terms of a general principle which developed into classical conditioning
Issues with reasoning
1) distraction by irrelevant information
- Sternberg (1988) - drawer with 19 black socks & 13 blue ones
- how many do you have to pick out to get a matching pair?
- students distracted themselves with the numbers of socks when in fact you only need to pull out 3 to get a pair
2) belief bias
- tendency to abandon logical rules in favour of our personal beliefs
- eg argument for smoking is good for ones health - if the premises are true (don’t have to be valid) then the conclusion is true
- many people forget this due to their personal beliefs on smoking
3) emotions and framing
- when we evaluate problems or make decisions we can sometimes abandon logical reasoning in favour of relying on our emotions (gut instinct) to guide us instead
- framing - the way in which the information is presented to us eg 50% success rate or 50% failure rate
Describe the four steps in problem solving
1) interpret (frame) and understand the problem
2) generate a hypothesis or possible solutions
3) tests the solutions or hypothesis, seeking to disconfirm one or more of them to find the correct one
4) evaluate the results and if necessary repeat steps 1, 2 & 3
