Archive for June, 2011
Conformity
Doing something without being told (Compliance is doing something when asked. Obedience is doing something when told.)
Conformity is learned and reinforced and some genetic factor too.
You can conform to a point that it is bad for you.
Experiment: Subjects put in a group of confederates and asked to make judgments about…
Social Prejudice
Negative attitudes that are held about some identifiable group that are largely based on generalizations, faulty, and incomplete information
They are typically reinforced on a variable (ie. Hard to extinguish) schedule
Is discrimination on nonvalid or valid criteria?
Discrimination is denying or hiring someone based on relevant criteria.
Causes of Social Prejudice
Social (economic)…
Cognitive Development
innate or learned?
Debated endlessly by philosophers and psychologists:
Nativists ↔ Empiricists
Nature ↔ Nurture
Heredity ↔ Environment
Chomsky ↔ Skinner
Language Development
Chomsky: it’s amazing that children can learn language…
How does one go about studying problem solving?
Think Aloud Protocol
Subjects “think out loud” as they solve a problem. It is helpful in identifying certain aspects of problem solving. In fact, it helped discover functional fixedness.
It does have its drawbacks:
It’s a form of introspection – can only report what one is…
Read MoreProblem Solving
A problem to think about (Nine dot problem):
Try and connect the nine dots by drawing four continuous straight lines without lifting your pen from paper?
Historical Roots
1. Edward Thorndike
He studied cats. More specifically, he studied the escape behavior of cats from puzzle boxes. He found fairly random behavior with success…
Read MorePragmatics
the study of contextual factors in communication. (situational and social factors)
Grices Model
Conversations have one overarching principle, called the cooperative principle. Assumption of cooperation underlies almost all communication. Few exceptions: arguments, hostile witness
Number of conversational maxims (ways to achieve cooperation):
1. maxims of quantity
a. make your contribution as informative as is required
b….
Concepts and Knowledge Structures
Concepts
categories by which we organize the world. These include natural (animals) and man-made (furniture) . It’s a fundamental aspect of cognition. High similarity across cultures and languages. It affects memory, thought, and language
Classical View:
Concepts are all well-defined
There are necessary and sufficient criteria to determine category membership
Example: bachelor…
Semantic Memory
(1) Network Model (Quillian 1968)
Artificial intelligence researcher wanting to make a repository for moon rock data. His problem was how do you encode a lot of related information in a small amount of space. He proposed a network model that may have relevance to human memory: Teachable Language Comprehender…
Mental Imagery
Characteristics
Galton – (1880) -
had people imagine their breakfast tray from that morning
(1) Illumination – dim or fairly clear? Brightness comparable to actual scene? People report their mental image is dimmer than if you were really there.
(2) Definition – everything well defined at the same time or does the sharpness…