Sternberg's Cognitive Psyc 3rd ed chapter 7
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- define epistemology
- the study of the nature, origins and limits of human knowledge
- define declarative knowledge
- facts that can be stated. eg: the date of your birth, the name of your best friend.
- define procedural knowledge
- procedures that can be implemented. eg: the steps involved in tying your shoelaces.
- name the 2 main sources of empirical data on knowledge representation
- standard laboratory experiments and neuropsychological studies
- what happens in experiment work
- researchers indirectly study knowledge representation by observing how people hanle various cognitive tasks that require the manipulation of mentally represented knowledge.
- what happens in neuropsycological studies?
- researchers either observe how the normal brain responds to various cognitive tasks involving knowledge representation or observe the links between various deficits in knowledge representation and associated pathologies in the brain
- define symbolic representation
- the relationship between the word and what it represents is simply arbitrary
- true or false: Pictures aptly capture concrete and spatial information in a manner analogous to whatever they represent; words handily capture abstract and categorical information in a manner that is symbolic of whatever they represent.
- true
- define imagery
- the mental representation of things that are not currently being sensed by the sense organs
- true or false: Imagery may only involve the visual sense.
- Fals. Imagery may involve mental representations in any of the sensory modalities.
- Explain dual-code theory (Allan Paivio)
- we use both imagined and verbal codes for representing information. These two codes organize information into knowledge that can be acted on, stored somehow, and even later retrieved for subsequesnt use.
- define analogue code
- a form of knowledge representation that preserves the main perceptual features of whatever is being represented.
- define symbolic code
- a form of knowledge representation that has been chosen arbitrarily to stand for something and that does not perceptually resemble whatever is being represented.
- true or false: Verbal information and imaginal information are processed the same way
- False. A response involving visual perception can interfere with a task involving manipulations of a visual image suggesting that use of two distinct codes for mental representation of knowledge.
- explain (conceptual) propositional theory
- we do not store mental representatinos in the form of images. Rather, our mental representations (sometimes called "mentalese") more closely resemble the abstract form of a proposition.
- Define proposition
- the meaning underlying a particualr relationship among concepts. May be used to describe any kind of relationship, such as actions, attributes, positions, class membership, and so on.
- define ambiguous figure
- a figure that can be interpreted in more than one way.
- define mental realignment of the reference frame
- shifting the positional orientations of the figures on the mental 'page' or 'screen' on which the image is dispayed
- define mental reconstrual of parts of the figure
- picture form... the ducks bill is the rabbit's ears.
- Name 4 ways that we reinterpret ambiguous figures
-
1. Implicit reference-frame
2. Explicit reference-frame
3. Attentional
4. Construals from 'good' parts - Define implicit reference-frame
- participants were first shown another ambiguous figure involving realignment of the reference frame
- define explicit reference-frame
- participants were asked to modify the reference frame by considering either 'the back of the head of the animal they had already seen as the front of the head of some other animal'.
- define attentional hint
- participants were directed to attend to regions of the figure where realignments or reconstruals were to occur
- define construals from 'good' parts
- participants were asked to construe an image from parts determined to be 'good' rather than from parts determined to be 'bad'.
- define functional-equivalence hypothesis
- although visual imagery is not identical to visual perception, it is functionally equivalent to it; that is, as Paivio suggested decades ago, although we do not construct images that are exactly identical to the percepts, we do construct images that are functionally equivalent to percepts.
- Principle of Visual imagery #1
- Our mental transformations of images and our mental movements across images correspnd to similar transformations of and movements across physical objects and percepts.
- Principle of Visual imagery #2
- The spatial relations among elements of a visual image are analogous to those relations in actual physical space
- Principle of Visual imagery #3
- Mental images can be used to generate information that was not explicitly stored during encoding
- Principle of Visual imagery #4
- The construction of mental images is analogous to the construction of visually perceptible figures
- Principle of Visual imagery #5
- Visual imagery is functionally equivalent to visual perception in terms of the processes of the visual system used for each.
- define degraded stimuli
- stimuli that are blurry, incomplete, or otherwise less informative.
- define practice effect
- improvements in performace associated with increased practice.
- true or false: Preliminary findings based on primate research suggest that areas of the cerebral cortx have mappings that resemble the 2-D spatial arrangements of visual receptors in the retina of the eye
- true
- true or false: Imagery and perception have been found to be functionally equivalent in psychological studies
- true
- define image scaling
- phenomena related to image size
- define resolution
- ability to distinguish individual elements, such as parts of an object or physically adjacent objects.
- True or false: seeing feature details of small objects is easier than seeing such details of large ones.
- False. Large is easier than small
- Explain the concept of imagery zooming
- when we zoom in closer to objects to perceive featural details, sooner or later we reach a point at which we can no longer see the entire object. To see the whole object once more, we must zoom out.
- describe Kosslyn's experiment regarding relative image size.
- Asked participants to imagine four differednt paris of animals: elephant and a rabbit, a rabbit and a fly, a rabbit and an elephant, and a rabbit and a fly-sized elephant. It took longer to describe the details of the smaller objects.
- Does physical size of the features have any effect on performance time for nonimagery condition objects.
- no
- Do dual-code theory and propositional theory oppose each other? if so, how?
- Yes. Dual code theory suggests that knowledge is represented both in images and in symbols while propositional theory suggests that knowledge is represented only in underlying propositions, not in the form of images or of words and other symbols.
- define demand characteristics
- the experimenter's expectancies regarding the performance of participants on a particular task create an implicit demand for the participants to perform as expected.
- mental representations may take any of 3 forms. name them.
- Propositions, mental models, or images. Propositions are fully abstracted representations of meaning which are verbally expressible. Mental models are constrained by the individuals' im;licit theories about these experiences. Images are much more specific representations, which retain many of the perceptual features of the particular object.
- true or false: imaginal representation also may occur in an auditory modality
- true. based on hearing as in the case of blind people.
- True or false: Lesions in the right hemisphere of the brain are associated more strongly with impaired visual memory and visual perception where as lesions in the left hemishpere are associated more strongly with impaired verbal memory and verbal compreh
- true
- true or false: the right hemishpere of the brain appears to be more proficient in representing and manipulating knowledge of a visuospatial nature in a manner that may be analogous to perception, whereas the left hemishpere appears to be more proficient
- true
- define cognitive maps.
- cognitive maps offer internal representations that simulate particular spatial features of our external environment.
- Name 3 types of knowledge humans use when forming and using cognitive maps
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1. Landmark knowledge
2. route-road knowledge
3. survey knowledge - define landmark knowledge
- information about particular features at a location and which may be based on both imaginal and propositional representations
- define route-road knowledge
- specific pathways for moving from one location to another and which may be based on both procedurlal knowledge and declarative knowledge
- define survey knowledge
- involves estimated distances between landmarks, much as they might appear on survey maps, and which may be represented imaginally or propositionally.
- true or false: people use only analogical code for imaginal representation such as images of maps.
- False. They also use propostional code.
- define mental shortcuts.
- cognitive strategies termed heuristics, often described as as rules of thumb, that infuluence our estimation of distance.
- List 5 types of mental image distortion.
-
1. Right angle bias
2. Symmetry heuristic
3. Rotation heuristic
4. Alignment heuristic
5. Relative-position heuristic. - define right angle bias
- people tend to represent intersections as forming 90 degree angles more than the angles really do.
- define symmetry heuristic
- People tend to represent shapes as being more symmetrical than they really are
- define rotation heuristic
- When representing figures and boundaries that are slightly slanted, people tend to distort the images as bing either more vertical or more horizontal than they really are.
- define alignment heuristic
- people tend to represent landmarks and boundaries that are slightly out of alignment by distorting their mental images to be better aligned than they really are.
- define relative-position heuristic
- people tend to represent the relative positions of particular landmarks and boundaries by distorting their mental images in ways that more accurately reflect their conceptual knowledge about the contexts in which the landmarks and boundaries are located, rather than reflecting the actual spatial configurations.
- True or false. Women find it easier to remember where they saw things (spatial-location memory), whereas men find it easier to do mental rotation of spatial images.
- true