Cognitive Psychology and Processes Flashcards

A student is trying to solve a complex physics problem. Instead of tackling the entire problem at once, they break it down into smaller, more manageable parts, such as identifying known variables, then finding the right formula, and finally calculating the solution for each part. This problem-solving strategy is best described as:

Answer: Means-ends analysis

Means-ends analysis is a problem-solving strategy that involves creating subgoals to reduce the distance between the current state and the desired goal state. By breaking the problem into smaller parts, the student is systematically working to close that gap.

Which of the following scenarios best illustrates the concept of episodic memory?

Answer: Remembering the details of your first day of high school.

Episodic memory is a type of long-term, declarative memory that involves the recollection of specific events, situations, and experiences. Remembering the details of a personal event like the first day of high school is a classic example of episodic memory.

According to Noam Chomsky's theory of language acquisition, humans are born with an innate ability to learn language. He termed this theoretical mechanism the:

Answer: Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

Noam Chomsky proposed the concept of the Language Acquisition Device (LAD) as a hypothetical mental faculty that enables humans to acquire and produce language. He argued that the rules of language are too complex to be learned solely through imitation and reinforcement, suggesting an innate predisposition.

In a classic dichotic listening task, a participant is asked to pay attention to a message presented in one ear while ignoring a different message in the other. According to Broadbent's Filter Model of attention, what is most likely to happen to the information presented to the unattended ear?

Answer: It is processed based on physical characteristics (e.g., pitch) and then filtered out.

Broadbent's Filter Model is an early selection theory suggesting that attention acts as a filter early in the processing stream. It posits that information is selected based on basic physical properties, and unattended information is blocked from further semantic processing.

After seeing several news reports about lottery winners, a person starts to overestimate their own chances of winning and decides to buy several tickets. This decision-making error is an example of the:

Answer: Availability heuristic

The availability heuristic is a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person's mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method or decision. Because the news reports of winners are recent and easily recalled, the person overestimates the probability of that event occurring.

A chef is in a kitchen and needs to pound a piece of meat, but cannot find the meat mallet. They fail to consider that a heavy-bottomed skillet could be used for the same purpose. This is a classic example of which cognitive barrier to problem-solving?

Answer: Functional fixedness

Functional fixedness is a cognitive bias that limits a person to using an object only in the way it is traditionally used. The chef is 'fixed' on the typical function of the skillet and cannot repurpose it to solve the problem.