Psyc 101 notes Unit 3: Learning, Memory, and Language & Thoughts

Learning

Learning
 Learning: gaining skills/knowledge/responses from experience, resulting in relatively permanent
changes in behavior
o Key word experiences meaning these behaviors are not known from birth
 Learning and memory
o Distinguishing memory from learning
 Memory
 All about holding information
 Learning
 About changes in behavior
 Will be some overlap
Classical conditioning
 Classical conditioning: when a neutral stimulus produces a response after being paired with a
stimulus that naturally produces a response
o You can get a behavior by pairing on stimulus with another
o Pavlov (studied salivation in dogs)

o Unconditioned stimulus (UCS) elicits an unconditioned response (UR)

 Stimulus reliably produces a naturally occurring reaction
 Response is a reaction that is reliably produced by UCS
o Neutral stimulus initially does not produce a reliable response
o During period of conditioning (Acquisition stage)
 The neutral stimulus (NS) is paired with UCS, over and over again, the response
we get is the UCR
o At the end of conditioning, we get a Conditioned stimulus (CS) that produces a
Conditioned Response (CR)
 CS is a stimulus that now produces a reliable response after being paired with
UCS
 CR is a reaction that resembles the UCR but is produced by a CS
o What we see is people gaining response from experience, resulting in changes in
behavior
o Extinction: repeated presentation of the CS alone to eliminate the CR
 o Generalization: stimuli similar to CS elicit CR
o Discrimination: Stimuli similar to CS do not elicit CR
 "this is not the same thing I will not react"
o John Watson & Rayner
 Little albert study (example of generalization)
 Even complex behaviors can result from conditioning
 At beginning, albert feared no animals including the white rat
 Then RA's began striking a bar with a hammer making a loud noise every
time Albert reached for the white rat, scaring him.
 After the pairing of rats and loud noises, Albert would cry every time he
saw a rat, and even when he saw other animals, a furry object, and even
a white mask
o Classical conditioning in the real world
 Drug addiction/overdose
 Body prepares to receive drugs in certain contexts (e.g. increased
breathing rate)
 If you take drugs in a certain spot mostly, your body will prepare you to
take the drug to combat the effects it brings (Increase heart rate before
taking heroin because it slows the heart down, called a Compensatory
reaction)
 If you then take the same amount of drug in a new place, the body
doesn’t know to elicit a compensatory reaction which could lead to an
overdose at the same usual dose
 Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
 Noises associated with trauma elicit fear responses
 Why fireworks can elicit attacks in people in war
 Phobias and fears
 Differ in severity and impact
 Treatment
 Systematic desensitization (extinction)
o Evolutionary elements
 Adaptive behaviors allow us to survive
 Taste aversions are learned
 Very rapidly acquired
 Over long conditioning interval
 Doesn’t have to elicit response often
 Because of perceptual qualities (taste, smell)
 More often associated with novel foods
 Happens more with foods you don’t eat all the time

Operant conditioning
 Thorndike (cat puzzle boxes)
o Put cat in a box, only way out is to press a lever and it opens the door (cat would figure
out by accident)
o Cat would get out and he would put it back in the box
o Eventually, cat learns to push lever to get out
 After a couple of attempts, the time to get out decreases sharply
 o Law of effect
 Good and bad outcomes influence likelihood of behavior being repeated
 Operant Conditioning
o Consequences of an organism's behavior determine whether it will repeat that behavior
in the future
o Consequences of operant conditioning
 2 axis's of consequence
 Reinforcements and Punishments
 Reinforcement: Increase likelihood of a behavior
 Punishments: decrease likelihood of a behavior
 Positive and Negative
 Positive: addition of a stimulus
 Negative: removal of a stimulus
 Can add them together
 Positive reinforcement: e.g. getting praise after studying hard,
giving a dog a treat after a "sit" command
 Negative reinforcement: e.g. Not having to do chores because
you volunteered at a shelter, neck pain lessens when you start
going to yoga class
 Positive punishment: e.g. note on academic record for cheating
on a test or assignment, hitting somebody for a bad behavior,
getting a speeding ticket
 Negative punishment: e.g. not getting allowance because you
skipped class, take a toy away from dog for accident, parent
takes away cell phone from child for data usage
o Skinner: operant conditioning chamber
o Principles of operant conditioning
 Generalization: learning that similar behaviors elicit the same consequence in
different contexts
 Ex: being well prepared for your psych exam results in a good grade, so
being well prepared for your biology exam should also result in a good
grade
 Discrimination: learning that similar behaviors elicit different consequences in
different context
 Ex: Pure memorization will get you a better grade in a language class,
but not in psychology
 Extinction: over time, without reinforcement, behavior diminishes
 Ex: if you stop paying an employee for doing work, they will stop doing
work!
 Shaping: reward steps along the way to a desired/target behavior (common to
animal training)
 Ex: teaching a cat to jump through your arms
 Primary reinforcer: fulfills a biological need
 Secondary reinforcer: acquired through (classical conditioning)
 Ex: money
 Premack Principle: highly probable behaviors reinforce less probable behaviors
 Ex: if you finish your veggies, you get dessert
  Instinctive drift: tendency to revert to natural (versus trained/learned)
behaviors
 Discovered by Skinner's former graduate students
o Reinforcement schedules
 Continuous reinforcement: behavior is reinforced every time it occurs
 Leads to more rapid learning because every time you do something,
there is a reward
 Intermittent reinforcement: behavior is reinforced after only some responses,
not all
 Less vulnerable to extinction
 Interval schedules: based on time intervals between reinforcements
 Fixed: reinforced at a specific time period
 Lower resistance to extinction
 Shorter intervals generate higher rates overall
 Long pauses after reinforcement yields "scalloping" effect
 Variable: reinforced on average after a given amount of time
 Higher resistance to extinction
 Low, steady rate without pauses
 Shorter intervals generate higher rates overall
 Ratio schedule: based on ratio of responses to reinforcements
 Fixed: reinforced at a fixed number of responses
 Lower resistance to extinction
 Rapid responding
 Short pause after reinforcement
 Higher ratios generate higher response rates
 Variable: reinforced on average after a given number of responses
 Higher resistance to extinction
 High, steady rate without pauses
 Higher ratios generate higher response rates
 Operant conditioning in daily life
o Pets
 You train pets thru operant conditioning
o Children
 You raise a child through operant conditioning
 The child picks up on what's going on
 Superstitious behavior
o Consequences are linked to behaviors that have nothing to do with the outcomes
o Athletes are notoriously superstitious
o Animals are superstitious
o Lots of superstition in gambling
Compare types of learning
 Classical conditioning
o Response
 Reflexive
 (Mostly) involuntary behaviors
o Extinction process
  CR (conditioned response) decreases when CS (conditioned stimulus) is
repeatedly presented alone
o Cognitive processes
 Develop expectation that CS signals arrival of UCS (unconditioned Stimulus)
o Biological predispositions
 Constrained by what stimuli and responses can be easily associated
 Operant conditioning
o Response
 Non-reflexive
 Voluntary behaviors
o Extinction process
 Responding decreases when reinforcement stops
o Cognitive processes
 Develop expectation that a response will be punished or reinforced
o Biological predispositions
 Best learned behaviors are similar to natural behaviors
 
Observational learning
 Learning takes place by watching the actions of others
 Bobo doll experiments
o Albert Bandura
o Children learned to fight doll after watching adults do it
o No conditioning
 Diffusion chain
o Individuals learn a behavior by observing another individual perform that behavior, and
then serve as a model from which others can learn the behavior
 Picky observers
o Humans do not imitate everyone they interact with
o We are more likely to imitate people whom we consider to be:
 Part of our social group (e.g. same language)
 Attractive
 Prestigious
 Accurate
Observational learning in animals
 Monkeys and chimpanzees can learn tool use through observation
 Children are more likely than chimps to copy model exactly
 Chimps raised with humans are more likely to copy model actions exactly
 
Implicit learning
 Learning that takes place outside of awareness of
o Process of acquisition
 You don’t know how you are learning it
o Products of acquisition
 You don’t know what you are learning
 Types of implicit learning
o Language learning
  Implicit learning because you don’t know how you are learning it (as a child by
hearing) and you don’t know exactly what you are learning to do
 Motor learning
 I.e. Bike riding, you just learn how to do it
 Social learning
 Nobody gives you explicit rules of social interaction
 You just eventually learn social rules and norms
o Studying implicit learning
 Artificial grammar
 Is just made up grammar rules
 Follow rules of a new grammar
 Stimulation of Broca's area enhances learning of artificial grammar
 Implicitly learning artificial grammar
 No explicit rules given for color block sentence (example given)
 How to tell if it was learned
 Accuracy increases
 Artificial grammar studies
 Accuracy of detecting artificial grammar violations improves (i.e.
show learning of grouping rules0
 Reaction time decreases
 Serial reaction time tasks
 Participants are faster to correctly respond in serial response
time task but are unaware of the pattern
o How learning happens in brain
 Implicit learning
 Decreased activity in the occipital lobe
 Explicit learning
 Increased activity in
 Left temporal lobe
 Right frontal lobe
 Right parietal lobe

Memory

What is memory?
 The ability to store and retrieve information over time
 
Information processing framework
 3 main stages
o Encoding
 Getting the information in
o Storage
 Keeping the information around
 o Retrieval
 Getting the information out
 Encoding
o Transform information to store in memory
 Organizational encoding
 Putting information into categories
 Organizing information
 Levels of processing
 Craik & Lockheart
 Shallow
 Few basic features
 Example: structural encoding
 Intermediate
 More features
 Example: phonemic encoding
 Deep
 Most features, combined with existing information in your brain
 Example: Semantic encoding
o How to strengthen encoding
 Dual Coding: Use visual imagery to help remember
 Mnemonic devices: techniques to assist memory
 Helpful when presented with list you need to memorize
 Imagine taking a walk through of your house, making various stops in
rooms/places
 Imagine each list word at a particular stop
 When you need to remember the list, "walk" through your house
 Keyword method: Language vocabulary
 Pair the foreign language word with a native language word that sounds
familiar
 Pair the keyword with an image that represents the meaning of the
foreign language word
 Storage
o Keeping information available
o Sensory memory
 Auditory and visual stimuli
 The things you hear and the stuff you see
 Echoic memory
 "minds ear"
 When you space out while someone is talking to you and without really
listening, you know what they said. Your brain catches the "echo"
 Iconic memory
 Visual persistence
 Information persistence
 Very large capacity for sensory memory
 Can lose the sensory memory very fast
o Working and short-term memory
 Difference between working and short term memory
  You can store short term memory, however to remember it you have to
actually work the memory
 Active maintenance of memory
 Working memory
 Active process we can do to hold things in our brain
 Phonological loop
 Verbal information
 If you tell me something just with words
 Engage in Articulatory rehearsal
 Keeping going over words again and again
 Dory from finding nemo repeating "just keep
swimming" or "42 wallaby way"
 Visuo-spatial sketchpad
 For shapes, color, location, memory
 Mind refreshes images so that it stays in your brain
o Long term memory
 Hold information for a long time
 Encoding information while in short term memory will turn it to long term
 Retrieval happens when you are taking info from long term memory and
bringing it to short term to remember it
o Consolidation
 Stabilizing memory in brain
 New trace is gradually woven into the memory system
 Formation of new long-term memories
 Two stages to consolidation
 Rapid (seconds/minutes)
 Long term (weeks/years)
 Sleep matters a ton for consolidation
 Type of sleep
 Amount of sleep
Retrieval
 Bringing information back to mind
o Context is extremely important
 Cues
o Stimuli associated with stored information that help with retrieval
 A clue to help you remember something
o External cues
 Encoding specificity principle
 Recreate the encoding environment
 More likely to remember things in the same environment you learned it
 Transfer appropriate processing
 Matching encoding & retrieval
o Internal cues
 State-dependent retrieval
 Internal context provides cues
 Matching encoding & retrieval
 Retrieval is dependent on mental state
  States
 Mood
 If you learn something in a happy mood, and you are
tested in a happy mood, you are more likely to
remember
 Drugs
 Learn words on drugs, then were tested sober and
intoxicated. If you learned it drunk, you'll remember it
better drunk
Types of long term memory
 Explicit memory
o Conscious, effortful recall of information and experiences
o Also known as declarative memory
o Two types of explicit memory
 Semantic
 General knowledge, facts, concepts
 Not attached to a specific moment
 Episodic
 Specific personal experiences
 Attached to a specific moment (and location)
o Episodic memory phenomena
 Infantile amnesia: little to no memory before age of 5
 Why?
 Hippocampus is not developed enough to form and consolidate
memories
 Reminiscence bump:
 Increased (usually episodic) memories between ages 10-30
 Possible explanations
 Self-image/identity
 Situation where you are more likely to think
about who you are
 Cognitive development
 Period of calmness after your 30s to consolidate
 Cultural life script
 Within a culture there are milestones for life
 When you have milestones, they mostly occur
between 10-30, helps you remember your time
around then
 Implicit memory
o Non-conscious, effortless, retrieval influences behavior, non-declarative
o Two aspects
 Procedural
 How to do things
 Result of practice
 Example: mirror tracing
 About skills, "knowing how"
 Priming
  Recent exposure behavior
 Includes words and visual images
 Example: word fragment completion
 About: recent exposure, easier access
 
Seven "sins" of memory
 Errors of omission
o Leaving information out
 Transience
 Failures of memory because of passage of time
 Trace decay
 The encoded memory will fade as time goes on
 Majority of decay happens shortly after the information is
processed
 Interference
 New/old information gets in the way of retrieval
 Retroactive interference
 New learning interferes with old
 Proactive interference
 Old learning interferes with new
 Blocking
 Information is there, but not accessible (failure to retrieve)
 Tip of the tongue phenomenon
 Most commonly forgotten:
 Names of people
 Names of places
 Absentmindedness
 Lapse of attention
 Usually important at encoding
 "in one ear, out the other"
 Can be critical at retrieval
 Can cause misrecognition of cues
 If you aren't paying attention, you will miss cues
 Prospective memory
 Remembering to do something in the future
 Errors of commission
o Inclusion of incorrect/unwanted information
 Memory misattribution
 Source memory:
 Remember how information was acquired - when, where, how
 Memory misattribution
 Assigning a recollection or an idea to the wrong source
 DRM paradigm
 Can induce feelings of false recognition
 Picked a list of words all related to a theme
 Asked participants to memorize quickly
  Participants recalled related words to the theme that
were not on
 Frontal lobe damage
 More likely to have instances of false recognition
 Is involved in effortless retrieval process
 When you have to think hard
 Suggestibility
 Tendency to incorporate misleading info from external sources into
personal memories
 Error: falsely "remembering" plausible but incorrect information
 False memories
 You can have people recall things that never happened
 Eyewitness memory (suggestibility in real world)
 Leading questions
 Can lead a person to recall something that never
happened
 Leading them to a false memory
 Language is impactful
 The way you phrase the question can be problematic
 i.e. leading questions
 Why does suggestibility happen?
 Memory is reconstructive, information is being replaced and/or
added
 Memory is "gist" information, filling gaps
 Fill gaps in between gist, we don’t remember absolutely
everything
 Bias
 Influences of knowledge, beliefs, and feelings
 Beliefs
 Reduce cognitive dissonance
 Cognitive dissonance
 Holding two contradictory opinions in you
 Uncomfortable feeling
 Solution
 "adjust memory" to resolve discomfort
 Types of belief bias
 Consistency bias
 Change bias
 Egocentric bias
 Persistence
 Inability to forget
 Example: after a break up
 PTSD
 Individuals cannot forget a traumatic experience
 Flashbulb memories
 Detailed recollections of when and where we heard about
shocking news
  Extremely vivid
 Highly emotional
 Feelings of certainty
 Accuracy?
 Not necessarily correct on what happens
 Recall less detail than everyday memory
 People feel more confident of what they remember
 
Long term potentiation
 Happens in synapse
 Long-term potentiation (LTP): Connection between neurons is strengthened after repeated
activation over time
o Starts off as normal looking synapse
o After repeated activation, we see changes
o The Synaptic neuron starts making more receptors
 Able to receive more transmitters
o Over time, with more receptors, the axon sends more neurotransmitters
 Making connection stronger
o Metaphor
 Skiing/sledding
 The more times you go over a bit of snow, the deeper the tracks get
Areas of the brain
 Hippocampus
o Medial temporal lobes around it
o Acts as "index" that links different aspects of memories
 Holds it and makes sure that the parts can be linked
 Prefrontal cortex
o Involved in executive function
 Working memory
 Amygdala
o Involved in memory for emotional events
 Core network
o Different parts of brain working together
o Active during recall of episodic memory
 And imagining the future
 
Case study #1 - H.M. 1950's
 Suffered sever epilepsy
 They gave him a Complete Bilateral Hippocampectomy
o They took out both sides of the hippocampus
 Because the seizures were coming from there
o Cured epilepsy, but gave major memory deficits
 Deficits
o Anterograde amnesia: inability to form new (long term) memories (can include both
episodic and semantic)
o Retrograde amnesia: inability to retrieve past events/details
  Temporally graded (more memory loss closer to amnesia-causing event)
 Preserved functions
o Intelligence, procedural memory, implicit memory, short-term memory, and some long
term memories before surgery
 Can use parts of memory
o You don’t just lose all memory
o You can have deficits in specific memory types
 
Dissociations
 Dissociations: damage to a region of the brain leaves one function intact, while another function
is disrupted
o Used as evidence for functional regions of the brain
o H.M.
 Damage to his hippocampus resulted in anterograde and some retrograde
amnesia, but didn’t touch procedural, other implicit memory, and short-term
memory
 
Case study #2 K.C.
 Motorcycle accident resulted in severe damage to the medial temporal lobes, including the
hippocampus
 Deficits
o Anterograde amnesia
 Unable to form new memories
o Retrograde amnesia
 Unable to recall episodic memories from the past
o Cannot imagine the future
 Preserved functions
o Intelligence
o Semantic knowledge (about self, specific to his work/interests, general knowledge)
o Procedural memory
o Short-term (working) memory
Case study #3 Clive Wearing
 Herpes viral encephalitis caused extensive damage to his prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, as
well as other areas of the temporal lobes
 Deficits
o Anterograde amnesia and retrograde amnesia
 Wakes up everyday thinking he just woke up for first time
o Short and long term memory deficits
 Forgets sentences right after
 Preserved functions
o Intelligence
 Can answer questions
o Procedural memory
 Can still play the piano
 Dissociation -> damage to PFC (prefrontal cortex) and hippocampus and MTL (medial temporal
lobe) caused deficits, but left some functions intact
 
What can we learn from these case studies
 Short term memory
o Prefrontal cortex needed for short term memory
 For working memory
 Digit span
 Remembering in the moment
 Long term memory
o Hippocampus
 Not place for all long term memory
 Procedural memory/Implicit memory
o Basal ganglia might have role
o Cerebellum also seems to be involved
o Not enough research done

Language & Thought

How do we communicate?
 Language: system for communication using signals, combined according to rules of grammar, to
convey meaning
 Grammar: set of rules that specify how units of language can be combined to produce
meaningful messages
Human language
 Basic structure
o Phoneme (smallest measure)
 Smallest units of sound that are recognizable as speech
 The sound "M"
o Morpheme
 Smallest meaningful units of language
 My = M + ai
o Phrase
 Combination of morphemes governed by syntactical rules
 My dog = (m+ai) + (d+o+g)
o Different phonological, morphological, and syntactical rules for different languages
 Phonemes vary across languages
o Some phonemes don’t appear in every language
 German: these pairs of words sound the same in English
 Celery and salary
 Bed and bad
 Morphology rules
o Content morphemes
 Things and events
 i.e. cat, dog, take
o Function morphemes
 Serve grammatical functions
 Tie sentences together
 i.e. and, or, but
 Added to content morphemes
  Add "s" to a word to make plural
 Goat(s)
 Add "d" to a word to make past tense
 Bake(d)
 Add "re" to mean repeat
 (re)do
 Add "ure" to create a noun
 Fail(ure)
o Deep and surface structure sentences
 Deep structure: the meaning of a sentence
 Start with it when building a sentence
 Surface structure: how the sentence is worded
 Start with it when understanding sentence
 Forgotten once deep structure is extracted
 Example:
 "the dog eats the bone" vs "the bone was eaten by the dog"
 Different surface structure
 The wording is different
 Deep structure is the same
 The meaning is the same
 Language development
o On average if you are 1 year old you know around 10 words
o If age 5 you know around 10,000 words
o Up to 6 months old babies can distinguish between all sounds in all languages
 Important because you need to learn a language, must be prepared for anything
o Milestones in language development
 10-12 months
 First words
 "mama"
 Usually nouns
 Fast mapping
 Single exposure
 After one exposure, the child can connect the word with
object
 ~24 months
 Two word sentences
 "give cookie"
 Telegraphic speech
 Short sentences
 As short as 2 words
 Devoid of function morphemes, mostly content
 3-5 years
 Grammatical rules
 "give me the ball"
 Over-generalization of grammar rules
 I.e. "I eated the cake"
  They learned that adding an "ed" makes past tense.
General application of the rules to all things. Not
grammatically correct
o How do we learn our native language
 Behaviorist Theory
 Environment stimulates verbal learning
 If a parent talks a lot, then the child will learn it faster
 Strengthened or weakened based on reinforcement or extinction
 Positive reinforcement
 Nativist Theory
 Language development is an innate, biological capacity
 Brain is equipped with a universal grammar
 Your brain will create some language
 Interactionist theory
 Some sort of innate language ability but we also need some sort of
environmental experience to learn language
 E.x. sign language development in Nicaragua
 Very isolated, deaf people didn’t have much exposure to other
deaf people.
 In 80's they started making schools for deaf kids
 Window for language learning is up until 7 years old
 Children showed no interest in learning a pre-existing sign
language, chose to communicate in their own sign language
 "language needs a community to develop"
 Lateralized
 Lateralization: some cognitive processes are dominant on one side of
the brain, in one hemisphere
 Language and the brain
o Aphasia: difficulty with language (comprehension or production)
o Most prominent structures in brain with language are lateralized to the left side of the
brain
 Broca's aphasia
 Issues with the production of articulate speech
 Damage to Broca's area
 Located in frontal lobe
 Difficulties with speech production
 Wernicke's aphasia
 Damage to Wernicke's area
 Issues with language comprehension and meaning
 Speech tends to be meaningless
 Cannot form sentences
 Flows out fluidly, but the words don’t mean anything
 Brains adapt with left-handedness
 In some cases, these will be on the right side
 Bilingualism
o Majority of the world speaks more than one language
o Does this impact our ability to learn language?
  With research, children learning 2 languages reach developmental milestones at
the same pace for each language
o Code-switching
 Switching from one language to another
 Children do not confuse the two languages
 Will if parents do
 Will if they don’t know equivalent words in other language
 
 
Concepts
 Concept: Mental representations that group or categorize shared features of related objects,
events, or other stimuli
o If you have a concept you can designate category
 Categories "professor"
 Putting things in categories
 Necessary conditions: required to be true, achieved, or present;
needed; essential
 Qualities that need to be true
 What is necessary for "professor" category
 Adult
 Teach at least one class
 Have a PhD (or equivalent)
 Sufficient conditions: enough; adequate to join membership of
category
 Enough for category membership - guaranteed
 Dr. John Nash at MIT
 "Set" of conditions
 Examples:
 What is a dog?
 Necessary
 Mammal, 4-legged, snout
 Sufficient
 Gets called a "pitbull"
 What is a square
 Necessary
 4 sides, equal length, 90 degree angles
 Sufficient
 Set of above conditions
 Family resemblance theory: members of a category have
features that appear to be characteristic of a category but may
not be shared by every member
 Prototype theory
 Compare new instance to "most typical" example of
category
 "average" of encounters within category
 Compare something to the "prototype" to see if
they fall in category
  Exemplar Theory
 Compare new instance to other stored examples
 Specific encounters of category members
 Referring back to specific encounters you had
with the category members
 What happens when categories are gone?
o Category-specific deficits
 Brain damage causes inability to recognize certain objects
 Objects outside the category are easily recognized
 Common category deficits
 Animals
 Tools
 Faces
 Deficits usually occur after brain trauma early in life
 Deficit depends on specific damaged region
o Damage and deficits
 Lower left temporal lobe
 Animals deficit
 Where temporal lobe meets occipital and parietal lobe
 Tools deficit
o Anomia
 Damage to angular gyrus
 Difficulty retrieving instances of categories, such as the names of vegetables
 Example:
 People may forget the names of a tool, but can remember the function
of the tool
o Prosopagnosia
 Inability to recognize faces
 Tendency to use compensation strategies
 Other cues to figure out who's who
 Rely on hairstyle
 No trouble with auditory cues
 Damage to the Fusiform Face Area (FFA)
 IN temporal lobes
 People with prosopagnosia have tend to have damage to this
area
o What do these category deficits mean
 Some brain regions are "pre-wired" to respond strongly to some categories than
others
 Similar activation for blind and sighted individuals
 Categories-specific organization does not depend on visual experience
Heuristics
 Heuristic: Short-cuts and rules that help us make decisions quickly and easily
o Satisficing: (combination of satisfy and sufficient) Using available information to make
satisfactory, not always optimal, decisions
 Decide what is "good enough"
o Heuristics used for factual, preference, behavior decision-making
o Can be "right" or "wrong", biased in some way
o Representative heuristic
 Decision depends on comparison to a prototype
 Example: what has more calories: beer or quinoa
 When asking most people, they will say beer
 Because we have an idea in our mind that Quinoa is healthy,
beer is unhealthy. So we think beer has ore calories. Quinoa
actually has more
 Base judgements solely on how representative of descriptions are
 Tendency to ignore information about base rate (the existing probability
of an event)
o "Factual" judgement heuristics
 Availability heuristic
 The more accessible an item is in memory, the more we expect it to
appear
 Can think of more words that start with K rather than words
with K at the third letter
 Words with first letter K are more accessible
 Media reports
 People from different countries are surveyed asking "how many
people in your country are muslim"
 The perceptions are much higher than the actual
 Why?
 Following 9/11 there was way more news about
Muslims, because of more availability of that,
people thought there were more.
 Why do these biases occur
 Frequency Format Hypothesis
 WE are judgers of frequency and not probability
 Taxicab problem
 In a town there was some hit and run incident,
witnesses report seeing a taxi cab. 2 taxi companies,
85% green taxi and 15% blue taxi. Witness reports
seeing blue cab do it. Witness is accurate 80% of the
time.
 12% chance of witness correctly identifying a
blue cab
 17% chance of the witness incorrectly
identifying a green cab as blue
 There is therefore a 29% chance the witness will
identify the cab as blue
 This results in a 41% chance that the cab
identified as blue is actually blue
o "preference" judgment heuristics
 Mere exposure effect
 We prefer things with which we are familiar
 Black bag experiment
  Dressed a student in a black bag, and said nothing. Monitored
how students felt about the black bag. But black bag person
kept coming to class. And they started to like this person, but
the person never talked, only came to class. Just the mere
exposure increased liking of the black bag.
 Prototypicality effect
 We prefer more typical members of a category over unique members
 Fluency effect
 We prefer items that are more easily (cognitively) processed
 Example: Font and pronunciation
 People preferred the font that was easiest to read
 People preferred things that are easier to pronounce
o Discrepancy Attribution Theory
 Quality of processing is different than expected, must be attributed to
something
 Context of decision is very important
 Familiarity judgments & false memories
o Changing our judgments
 Example: Imagine that Canada is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual
disease that is expected to kill 600 people
 You are in charge of CDC and must make decision
 Program A
 200 people will live
 Program B
 400 people will die
 These two options are the same
 However, more people will choose Program A
 Framing effects
 Different decisions made depending on how the issue is presented
 More people chose program A because it was worded as "200
people will live" instead of die
 In real world
 Buying food at grocery store
 Choosing between beef (80% lean vs. 20% fat)
 People will choose "lean" because it sounds
healthier even though there is no difference
 Good/bad news
 Remember: the information itself has not changed, only
the manner in which it is presented
 78% of people prefer to receive bad news first
 68% of people prefer to give good news first (unless
they took the receiver's perspective before choosing)
 Receiving the good news first leads to more self-
improvement behavior
 Therefore framing can lead to positive outcomes
 
What is a problem?
  One way is to compare
o Initial/current state of affairs does not equal your goal state (you future wanted state)
 No obvious immediate course of action
 Obstacles between current and goal state
 Problem solving
o Identify/define problem
o Form a strategy
o Organize information
o Monitor progress
Types of problems
 Well-defined problems: clearly specified goals and solution paths
o "whodunnit" problems
o Move problems
 Ill-defined problems: do not have clear goals
o International conflicts
o Optimal career choice
Solving problems
 Means-ends analysis
o Reduce difference between present an goal states
 Define present state
 Define goal state
 List difference between goal and present state
 Reduce differences
 How?
 Directly (achieve goal in one step)
 Generating a sub-goal (intermediate steps)
 Find a similar problem with a known solution
o In real life
 Works well for well-defined problems
 Clear path to solution
 Planning a trip
 Preparing for an exam
 Analogical Problem solving
o Finding a similar problem with a known solution and applying that solution to the
current problem
o Works for ill-defined problem
 Path to solution is not clear
 "I don’t know what to do, so ill look at past similar problems"
o Examples
 Advice from parents/friends
 Medical field
 Organ transplant
 Insight
o Perceiving the solution to a problem at an unexpected time or in an unanticipated way
o Insight is about problem restructuring
 Looking at the problem in a different way
  Can be hard to tell if you are close to a solution
 Potentially a result of incremental unconscious processes
o Researchers presented coherent and incoherent words set -> participants better than
chance at guessing which ones were coherent
 When presented with task there was an unconscious activation of relevant
memories
 Activation spreads through memory networks, recruits more relevant info
 When sufficient info has been activated, it crosses the threshold of awareness ->
INSIGHT
 Creativity
o Functional fixedness
 Tendency to perceive object functions as unchanging
 Inability to see non-traditional use of an object
o Discard assumptions in order to produce new ideas or actions!
 Allows you to produce new ideas and actions to solve a problem