All questions of Thinking for Humanities/Arts Exam

Aphasia is the term used to describe all types of language loss. Dyslexia refers to a specific reading impairment. Dysphasia refers specifically to partial language loss. Lexphasia is not a term used to describe language loss.

The psychology of language is concerned with the organization and processing of both written and spoken language. It is a complex field, at the interface of pure psychology, linguistics and communication studies. And as we examine how language is processed, it will soon become clear just how complex and mysterious the process is. For instance, a colleague of mine recently mentioned that he was feeling ‘low’ because he had just received some severe criticisms of a paper he had written. Why did I know immediately what he meant? Why did I not think he was simply nearer to the ground?

► Baby talk is a type of speech linked with an older individual speaking to a child. It is also known as a caretaker speech, infant-directed speech (IDS), child-directed speech (CDS), child-directed language (CDL), babysitter register, parentheses, or mothering.
► CDS is a fair and reduced strategy for contacting to younger children, used by adults and by older children. The glossary is defined, speech is slowed with a greater number of pauses, and the decisions are short and grammatically cleared, often replicated.

► The adjective sensory describes something relating to sensation, something that you feel with your physical senses. Sticking a knife into a toaster will give you a sensory experience, but so will smelling a rose.
► An image is a mental representation of a sensory experience; it can be used to think about things, places, and events.

The tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon is the temporary inability to retrieve a word that is well-known to us. The recency effect refers to the better recall of the last few items of information encountered. Wernicke’s aphasia refers to permanent problems with comprehending the speech of others whereas Broca’s aphasia refers to permanent problems in the production of language. Acquired dyslexia refers to impairments in reading as a result of brain damage.

Discourse refers to the overall message produced by combining related sentences whereas the alternative answers above do not refer to this process.

The findings of Gibbs show that the applicability of the standard comprehension model (Glucksberg & Keysar, 1990) is at best limited, although it is worth noting that the comprehension of sentences in stories and actual interactions in dialogue are very different situations, so we must guard against simplistic conclusions. Nevertheless, work on indirect speech-act comprehension reinforces the view that literal interpretation is not always necessary. Similar findings have been obtained for metaphor comprehension.

The research mentioned in the question above can be explained by the hindsight bias. This bias involves falsely overestimating the probability with which we would have predicted an outcome after we know it has already occurred. The alternative answers are not terms used to refer to this cognitive bias.

An example of the representativeness heuristic is that people are more likely to attribute a case of heartburn to spicy food than bland food. This heuristic is used to decide that something is likely by determining how well it corresponds to an idea of what is typical in a situation; it leads to ignoring base-rate information. The alternative answers all represent examples of the availability heuristic, which is used to decide that something is likely based on how quickly and easily it comes to mind.

There are two principal classes of phenomena that obviously require more than literal meaning. One is indirect speech acts, like the salt example above. The other is metaphor and related phenomena. For instance, if I say ‘Adolf Hitler was a butcher’, I do not mean it literally. Similarly, if I say ‘John is really blue (or low) today’, I do not mean that he is covered in blue dye, or has shrunk in height. I mean that he is depressed. We appear to process many metaphors so readily that it is difficult to see what the problem is, but the processing problem is huge: not only does the processor have to parse sentences, but she has to determine their significance too. The psychology of language understanding is about just these issues. Finally, interpretation proceeds by linking language to our knowledge about people and situations.

► Community psychology goes above an individual focus and accommodates social, cultural, economic, political, environmental, and international affects to promote positive change, health, and acceptance at individual and systemic levels.
► Depending on one’s training, experiences, and preferences, society psychologists can work as educators, professors, program directors, consultants, policy developers, authorities, and analysts in community organizations, universities, or government department to benefit mental health and community well-being.

A good book is like a good meal is an example of a simile, not a metaphor. The alternative answers are all examples of metaphorical expressions.

The modular view is that word meanings are stored in a way that is not context sensitive. When we encounter a string of letters that represents a word, we automatically look up and retrieve the meaning. If the string (such as ‘bank’) represents more than one word, then both meanings should be retrieved. The modular view is attractive because it keeps the mechanisms of looking up word meaning separate from context, and so is computationally simpler.

► Another word for Behaviour genetics is psychogenetics, the study of the effect of an organism's genetic configuration on its behaviour and the communication of heredity and environment since they affect behaviour.
► The contact in behaviour and genetics, or heredity, dates to the work of English scientist Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911), who compose the phrase “nature and nurture.”

► Amphetamine is a capable stimulator of the central nervous system. It is used to make some medical conditions, but it is also deeply obsessive, with a history of injustice.
► Amphetamine sulphate, or speed, is also for competitive and non-medical purposes. It can advantage to euphoria, and it contains the appetite, which can get to weight loss. Used outside the medical context, stimulants can have severe adverse effects.

► A mental set is a habit to only see explanation that have created in the past. This type of fixed thinking can make it ambitious to arise with solutions and can impede the problem - solving process. 
► For example, imagine that you are demanding to solve a math problem in your algebra class, if the last time your computer froze you proceed it and it worked, that may be the only solution you can think of the later time it freezes.

► Experience is ability or skill in a particular job or action that you have gained because you have done that work or action for a long time. Experience is used to refer to the past events, knowledge, and feelings that make up someone's life or character.
► Experience can be used as a boundless noun. You use it when you are conversing about knowledge or skill which is accessed from doing, seeing, or feeling things.

► Another name for Biological psychology is biopsychology or psychobiology. It is the function of the principles of biology to the consideration of mental actions and behaviour. Biological psychology as a scientific control appeared from a variety of objective and philosophical traditions in the 18th and 19th centuries.
► Biological psychology can be briefly described as the scientific study of the biological action underlying or affecting mind and behavior.

If I ask you, ‘What is 6 + 6?’, unless you are a young schoolchild, you will be able to retrieve the answer 12 straight from memory. On the other hand, if I ask you, ‘What is 37 + 568?’, you have to do some problem-solving. Being numerate means that you know how to solve this problem: it calls for a standard application of arithmetic procedures, and these procedures can be drawn from memory. This kind of problem-solving is called simply routine problem-solving. In contrast, creative problem-solving cannot be done according to a formula because there are no standard procedures in memory. As we experience the same problem type over and over again, what was at first creative may become routine, of course.

Mnemonics are techniques used to improve memory and therefore are not a component of natural language use. Syntax, pragmatics, semantics and discourse represent the different components of natural language use.

In the sentence ‘Harry drove to London’, there may be a default representation of the fact that a car was used. Subsequent mention of a car would not be a problem, because its default is already in the representation resulting from the sentence. This is what Garrod and Sanford (1982; 1983) found to be the case. In a fuller theory, Sanford and Garrod (1981; 1998) argued that we automatically relate what is being said to background knowledge, and that background knowledge is organized in long-term memory about specific situations.
They called these structures ‘scenarios’, and argued that the basic, most fundamental operation of understanding is to recognize the situation in which the message is set. So, because we are retrieving further situation information from memory, sentences can lead to representations that go beyond their content. Garnham (1979) required participants to try to remember sentences they had seen previously: e.g. ‘The housewife cooked the chips.’ Garnham found that participants remembered this sentence better if they saw the cue ‘fried’ than if they saw the cue ‘cooked’, even though ‘cooked’ is actually part of the original sentence. According to the scenario theory, this is because cooking chips has been implicitly represented as a situation in which frying is taking place. Of course, another possibility is that the word ‘fried’ simply provided more information, in terms of a cue for remembering.

Representation of the problem is crucial to how reasoning takes place and each of the protocols mentioned in the question above demonstrate the significance of participants’ initial representation of the problem on how they subsequently reason through it. The alternative answers do not represent the common factor that underlies the findings from the different research protocols mentioned in the question above.

► Babbling is a case in child development and a state in language addition during which a child come out to be experimenting with asserting articulate sounds but does not yet produce any recognizable words.
► Babbling be a precursor to language development or simply as vocal testing. The physical structures elaborated in babbling are still being developed in the first year of a child's life.

Reasoning based on intuition is not logical; it is automatic, fast, based on conviction and difficult to justify to others.

All of the answers included above represent critiques of some of the cognitive research that suggests people cannot reason rationally.

What two-word phrase can be made out of these letters ‘SPROGOLIBVELM’? What strategies would you employ to solve it? The simplest is blind search, in which you just move the letters around blindly until a phrase appears. The possibilities here are enormous, so blind search is clearly not a very smart way to proceed. But how do we constrain the search? There are some sequences of letters in English that are legal and commonplace (like ‘pro’), some that are rare (like ‘goli’), and some that are downright impossible (like ‘blvm’). So a smarter strategy is to try constructing fragments from common grammatically legal combinations, then trying sequences that are more and more rare. Fragments will serve to cue word possibilities that you know, which will help speed up the search.
With practice, people who like anagrams in crosswords develop a number of ways to constrain the search space. All problems can be construed in terms of search spaces, though this is more obvious with some problems than with others. In their classic book Human Problem-solving, Newell and Simon (1972) illustrated the problems of search space more thoroughly than anyone had before.

Swinney (1979) presented participants with spoken passages like these: (a) ‘Mary needed to buy some presents, so she went to the bank’; (b) ‘Mary found the river cold, so she swam to the bank.’ Immediately after the presentation of the ambiguous word, he presented a single letter string on a screen. Participants had to decide whether the letter string was a word or not (a lexical decision). When the string was a word, it could either be related to the intended sense of the ambiguous word (e.g. ‘money’), related to the other sense (e.g. ‘mud’), or unrelated to either. The question was whether there would be a response-time advantage for the intended-sense associate alone, or whether there would also be an advantage for the other-sense associate of the word too. It turned out that there was equal advantage (priming) for both senses. So context did not appear to affect initial sense selection. But if there was a delay of only 300 ms between hearing the ambiguous word and reading the letter string, the priming effect remained only with the intended (contextually cued) sense. This work suggests that word-meaning information is initially stored in a modular fashion, and its retrieval is uninfluenced by context. On the other hand, very shortly after a word has been processed, contextual cues inhibit the activation of word-sense information that is inappropriate.

A very important way of testing if–then statements is known as the Wason Selection or four-card problem (Wason, 1966). In this task, the participant is given a rule, and four cards are laid out that have information written on both sides. For example, here is a rule: If a card has a vowel on one side, then it has an even number on the other side.
Card 1: A
Card 2: D
Card 3: 4
Card 4: 7
The task is to verify (i.e. test) whether the rule holds by turning over the two cards that will enable this to be determined. Which cards would you turn over to verify the rule? Try it before you continue reading. The most frequent response is to check A and 4. Turning A will provide information that is consistent with the rule if there is an even number on the other side of the card, and will falsify the rule if there is an uneven number, so that’s fine. But turning 4 will achieve nothing, because the rule does not say, ‘If a card has an even number on one side, it will have a vowel on the other.’ Turning this card is very much like confirming the antecedent. In fact, the crucial second card to turn is the card with the 7, because if this has a vowel on it, then the rule is false. This problem is hard to think about. But real-life versions can be much easier. For instance, here is another rule: If a student is drinking beer, then they are over 18.
Card 1: Over 18
Card 2: Drinking beer
Card 3: Drinking Coke
Card 4: Under 18
How would you test the rule? Most people would now think the crucial card to turn was ‘Under 18’, because if that had ‘Drinking beer’ on the other side, there is a clear violation of the rule. This is because testing for under-age drinking is an example of detecting cheating, which is something we appear to be good at (Cosmides, 1989; Gigerenzer & Hug, 1992). The argument is that we have social rules to live by, and that we are naturally attuned to be able to test whether these rules are being broken. Clearly the representation of the problem is crucial to how reasoning takes place. When a concrete form of the problem is used, we can bring in specific procedures that we have access to for detecting cheats, which is something that is socially important. With an abstract version of the task, this is not possible.

Psycholinguistics has been especially concerned with how people parse sentences – that is, how they break them down into their correct grammatical structures. This has to be done because, otherwise, it would be impossible to interpret a sentence at all. Consider the following: “The horse raced past the barn fell”.
Is this an acceptable English sentence? What does it mean? In fact, it is a classic illustration of the problem of parsing. People normally find this a hard sentence to understand, because the parsing mechanism treats ‘The horse’ as an NP and ‘raced’ as the main verb, so it then expects more information consistent with the noun phrase. But the sentence actually contains what is called a reduced relative clause. Here it is in its unreduced version: “The horse that was raced past the barn fell.” By missing out the words ‘that was’, the relative clause is reduced. So, in fact, the structure of the sentence is: “NP: The horse (that was) raced past the barn VP: fell”.
The difficulty in understanding such sentences is ascribed to an initial misinterpretation, and is called a ‘garden path’ (see Frazier, 1987). A large amount of time and effort has gone into studying the human parsing mechanism because it is central to language comprehension and production. By misparsing the sentence above, there is a resultant failure in comprehension at all levels.

► Biofeedback is an elaborated action in which an external device achieves information to an individual about his or her physiological feedback and that allows the individual to then regulate these responses and receive feedback on advances in the physiological responses.
► The physiological feedback can be any responses that will be measured by an extraneous device. The most common responses consistent are muscle tension, heart rate, skin temperature, and galvanic skin response.