Question descriptionLanguage, Categorization, & Reasoning (Chapter 9)
- Components of a language – know the definitions of each
- Lexicon
- Grammar (syntax + morphology)
- Phonemes
- A writing system (optional component)
- What’s a morpheme? What’s the difference between a content morpheme and a function morpheme?
- Language milestones: What can children do at various ages between birth and 5 years?
- Acquiring a first language has variously been explained by learning theories, nativist theories, and interactionist theories. Understand the basic idea of each. The famous debate between Skinner and Chomsky contrasted which two of these, who was on each side?
- What does it mean to say that there is a critical period for language acquisition? What are the arguments for and against this idea?
- Where are Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas in the brain? How were they discovered? Are these the only brain areas responsible for human language?
- Which cortical hemisphere does the majority of language processing? How do we know?
- What is the linguistic relativity hypothesis?
- What kind of information does a “path” verb contain?
- What kind of information does a “manner” verb contain?
- Are path verbs or manner verbs more common in English? Are path verbs or manner verbs more common in Spanish and Greek?
- What would the linguistic relativity hypothesis predict about English versus Greek speakers judging the similarity of human actions or events involving motion? Have actual experiments supported that prediction?
- Understand the color-matching experiment in English and Russian speakers described in the textbook
- Categories & Concepts
- Rules versus family resemblance – definition of these terms. What is an example of a category with a clear membership rule? Example of a category with no rule, but family resemblance among members.
- Prototype, exemplar. Be able to define both of these.
- Neural basis of categorical knowledge
- Is everything stored in the same brain area? How do we know the answer to this question?
- Living things versus non-living things. Is one type of concept just more complicated/difficult than the other? How do we know the answer to this question?
- How does the sensory-motor theory explain the loss of some concepts but not others after brain damage?
Reasoning & Decision Making (Chapter 9, Lecture 16)
- Be able to apply the formula for a rational choice between options. Best choice = (value of the outcome) x (probability of that outcome occurring).
- Ways that human reasoning deviates from perfectly rational. For each of the reasoning errors below, be able to offer a short definition and recognize an example of flawed reasoning that stems from this error.
- Working with probabilities (percents) versus frequencies (numbers)
- Availability bias
- Conjunction fallacy
- Representativeness heuristic
- Framing effects
- Sunk-cost fallacy
- What is a heuristic? What is the generally good aspect of using heuristics in reasoning? Be able to provide an example where using a heuristic leads to the wrong conclusion.
- What does base rate mean? Why is it important when we are attempting to classify an item (assign it to a category)?
- Prospect theory notes that in many experimental studies, people will take a risk when there’s a possibility of avoiding a loss, but prefer to avoid risks when choosing between two possible gains. Below is one worked-out example of a situation involving loss, and how Prospect Theory applies. Be able to analyze the second situation (and new situations) in the same way.
- John got some extra income from a side job this year, and is trying to decide whether to declare it on his income tax return. Here are John’s options:
- Declare income and pay $2000 in taxes (100% certainty of losing $2000)
- Do not declare the income and pay no income tax. In this case, there is a 50% possibility that John will be audited, in which case he will have to pay $6000 as a combination of taxes and penalties.
- Which option would a perfectly rational decision-maker pick? (ignoring ethical considerations).
- Expected payoff (actually a loss) for Option A: $-2000 ($-2000 x 100%)
- Expected payoff for Option B: $-3000 ($-6000 x 50%) + ($0 x 50%)
- Rational decision maker picks Option A
- According to Prospect Theory, which option is John most likely to pick? (ignoring ethical considerations)
- According to Prospect Theory, people will take more risk when trying to avoid a loss, so that John is likely to pick Option B
- Elena won $50,000 playing the lottery. She wants to use this as a down payment on a house, but not until a year from now when she was planning to move to a new city. So she’s trying to decide what to do with the lottery winnings in the meantime. Her choices are:
- Put it in the bank, where she can earn 3% interest. No chance of losing any of it.
- Invest it in the stock market, where there is a 80% chance that her investment will increase by 10%. But there is also a 20% chance that her investment will decrease by 10%.
- Which option would a perfectly rational decision-maker pick?
- According to Prospect Theory, which option is Elena most likely to pick?
- How does damage to prefrontal cortex affect decision making? What other group has been shown to make decisions that resemble people with damage to the frontal lobe?
- What does analogical problem solving mean?
- What does functional fixedness mean? How does it prevent people from solving “the string problem” illustrated in the textbook?
Development (pp 102-109 in Chapter 3, Chapter 11, Chapter 12 pp 478-480)
- Given that infants can’t tell us what they’re thinking by speaking or pressing buttons, what sort of responses can researchers use instead? How would we know whether an infant recognizes/remembers something?
- Understand what the terms cephalocaudal and proximodistal mean for motor development in infants.
- Lev Vygotsky was a development psychologist who argued that young humans learn a lot from other people. What are three major abilities that contribute to this type of learning?
- What are Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development and major landmarks of each stage?
- Understand what object permanence and conservation mean, be able to recognize examples.
- What are some explanations for why young children fail at conservation tasks?
- What does theory of mind mean?
- How does the “false belief” task examine theory-of-mind?
- In which of Piaget’s stages does theory-of-mind start to appear?
- A poor theory-of-mind is a central symptom of what developmental disorder?
- Moral Development
- Piaget described three shifts in thinking as children develop a sense of right and wrong: Realism to Relativism, Prescriptions to Principles, and Outcomes to Intentions. Understand what each of these mean.
- What are Lawrence Kohlberg’s three stages of moral development and the general age range when people attain them?
- According to the moral intuitionist perspective, how are moral decision making and emotion linked?
- Adolescence is defined as the time between the onset of puberty and adulthood.
- When does puberty occur and how long does it last? Has that age always been the same?
- When does adulthood begin? Is that a fixed definition or dependent on cultural factors?
- Brain development across the lifespan
- How does the number of neurons in the brain change from conception through young adulthood?
- How does the number of synapses between neurons change from conception through young adulthood?
- Besides the sheer number of neurons and synapses, what other sort of brain development occurs after birth?
- What region of the brain is the last to mature?
- Temperament & Personality
- What’s the difference between these?
- What is a standard test for examining an infant’s temperament?
- How stable is temperament?
- What are the “Big 5” personality traits? How stable are they across a person’s life?
- Old age
- Understand the distinction between fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence. How do they change with advancing age?
- How does emotional state change over the adult age range?
Social Psychology (Chapter 13)
- What’s the big difference between humans and other “ultrasocial” species with a division of labor?
- What’s the difference between “social behavior” and “social influence”?
- What’s the best statistical predictor of who will engage in aggressive behavior?
- What does “the weather effect” say about causes of aggressive behavior?
- Humans (and some other species) are very sensitive to unfair distribution of rewards and to cheating of various sorts. Understand how people’s behavior in the Ultimatum Game demonstrate this? How is this sensitivity tied to cooperative behavior?
- What is the actor-observer effect?
- What are some reasons why decisions made by a group can be worse than the average of decisions made by individuals?
- Is a distressed person (someone who looks ill, or is being harmed) more likely to attract help when there are few people around or many people around? What is the social psychology explanation for the difference?
- Understand the mere exposure effect. Does this effect also apply to choosing a romantic partner?
- Sometimes people have unclear ideas about the causes of their own emotional state. This is true for romantic attraction as well. Understand how the “speed-dating” experiment and the “suspension bridge” experiments described in the textbook show this…. What factors made men feel attracted to the women they met (other than the women’s actual attractiveness)?
- How does the sunk-cost idea about decision making apply to decisions about romantic relationships?
- Understand how the hedonic motive, the approval motive, and the accuracy motive can be used to change people’s behavior.
- Which one of these is closely related to operant conditioning?
- Be able to recognize examples of the different motives at work. For example: A salesman tells me that most of my neighbors on my block have switched to one company to provide their electricity. My neighbors and I never discuss this. Which motive is the salesman trying to appeal to?
- Another example: Which motive was at work in Stanley Milgram’s infamous experiment where participants thought they were delivering harmful or fatal shocks to another participant?
- When we try to decide WHY someone did something, what are the two general types of explanation?
- How do our explanations differ when explaining someone else’s behavior versus our own behavior?
- What are some reasons why stereotypes about categories of people can be inaccurate?
- Stereotypes can harm people even when no one mistreats them – understand how stereotype threat experiments demonstrate this.
Psychological Disorders (Chapter 15)
- Genetics versus environment as causes of psychological disorders
- How can comparing monozygotic to dizygotic twins help separate genetic from environmental contributions to a disorder?
- Identical twins are monozygotic or dizygotic?
- What does concordance rate mean?
- If one identical twin has a psychological disorder but the other one does not, is it safe to conclude that there is no biological cause for the disorder?
- To answer the question above, think about epigenetics. (What is epigenetics?)
- To answer the question above, also think about the diathesis-stress model. (What is the diathesis-stress idea?)
- Know the major symptoms of:
- Generalized anxiety disorder
- Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
- Major depression
- Bipolar disorder
- How is bipolar disorder similar and different from depression and from schizophrenia?
- Schizophrenia
- What is meant by a “positive symptom” versus a “negative symptom”?
- What’s the difference between a hallucination and a delusion?
- How common are generalized anxiety disorder, depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia?
- Special categories of depression: Seasonal Affective Depression, Post-Partum Depression. WHEN are people vulnerable to these?
- Schizophrenia
- What’s the typical age of onset for schizophrenia?
- What is the concordance rate for schizophrenia in monozygotic twins and dizygotic twins?
- What do anatomical brain scans show in schizophrenic patients?
- What neurotransmitters are influenced by drug treatments for schizophrenia?
