Review for Test 3:

Chapter 9:

·  Be familiar with the following linguistic universals: semanticity, arbitrariness, flexibility of symbols, and productivity.
·  Be able to describe the five levels of analysis in linguistics; the distinction between performance and competence, and Whorf’s linguistic relativity hypothesis.
·  Understand the section on the phonology of language, including concepts like categorical perception, phonemic competence, the problem of invariance and co-articulation.
·  Understand the section on syntax.
·  Be able to describe the roles that lexical and semantic factors play in linguistic analysis. Pay particular attention to the section on case grammar.
·  Be familiar with the main types of aphasia. For each, know the disruption it produces and the relevant brain areas that are damaged.

Chapter 10:

·  Be familiarize with Miller’s conceptual and belief levels of language analysis.
·  Be able to describe Gernsbacher’s theory of discourse comprehension in detail, including (a) the processes of laying a foundation, mapping information and shifting, and (b) the control mechanisms of enhancement and suppression.
·  Be familiar with the mental process of bridging.
·  Understand how researchers use gaze durations to study reading, and the assumptions (i.e., immediacy and eye-mind) researchers make when using this technique.
·  Be familiar with how conversations are structured, by appeal to taking turns, and social roles and settings.
·  Be able to describe the cognitive conversational characteristics, including conversational rules, the cooperative principle, topic maintenance and direct versus second-order theories.
·  Be familiar with the empirical effects in conversation, including Holtgraves’ work on face saving and Keyser’s work on egocentric speech.

Chapter 11:

·  Be familiar with syllogistic and conditional reasoning. For the latter, be able to identify the two valid inferences (affirming the consequent, denying the antecedent) from sample arguments. How does general world knowledge interfere with our ability to reason rationally?
·  Be able to summarize the research on conditional reasoning, focusing on the Wason selection task, mental models and confirmation bias.
·  Be able to describe the research on decisions about physical differences, including the following effects: Distance, symbolic distance, and semantic congruity. Also be familiar with number magnitude effects.
·  Contrast an algorithm to a heuristic. Understand how the representativeness and availability heuristics work, as well as the type of questions researchers ask to measure each.
·  Be familiar with the simulation and undoing heuristics. For the latter, be able to define / give examples of uphill, downhill and horizontal changes. What is hindsight bias?
·  Understand how limited domain knowledge prevents people from reasoning correctly. Use research on Naïve Physics as an example.
·  Understand how limited processing resources prevent people from reasoning correctly.

Chapter 12:

·  Be familiar with the early research on problem solving, focusing on functional fixedness (as illustrated by the two-string and candle problems), and negative set (as illustrated by the water jug problems).
·  Define insight. Be able to summarize the evidence that problems can be solved suddenly.
·  Define analogy and be able to describe research in this area.
·  Know the four characteristics of problem solving, and the vocabulary in this area (i.e., problem space, initial state, goal state, operators, well and ill defined problems).
·  Understand how the means-end heuristic solves problems.