Exam 9: Language and Thinking

Which of the following statements about science is most accurate?

Before they ran any actual experiments, Darley and Latané based the development of their theory of diffusion of responsibility on the highly publicized murder of Kitty Genovese and a few other similar instances. This would represent an instance where science is utilizing __________ reasoning.

In his research on bilingual speakers, Lambert found that

Individual elements of a stimulus are analyzed and then combined to form a unified perception in _____________ processing.

Let's say that your psych professor asks you if you understand the material in Chapter 9 of the textbook. You reply that there are a few things that are unclear, but you feel confident that you know the rest. In this example, you are probably demonstrating good

Our tendency to prove or validate beliefs that we already hold instead of looking for evidence to disprove our assumptions is called

As an expert chef, Ben knows exactly how to make the best dish using whatever ingredients are available to him. Ben has a vast storage of knowledge that he has organized in his memory that enables him to quickly solve any cooking dilemma he might be faced with. This knowledge is organized in ________________.

According to the availability heuristic, we often base our probability decisions on

One study asked college students to predict the likelihood of experiencing different personal life events. The researchers found that students' accuracy in making predictions was unrelated to how certain they were about their predictions. This is an example of

People typically believe that fires cause more deaths, but statistics reveal that drowning actually causes significantly more deaths than fire. Some researchers argue that we make this error because TV news programs show much more footage of fires than drowning, because fires are more exciting to televise. This presumably makes it much easier for us to call up examples of death by fire. This particular finding is best considered as an example of a judgment error caused by

Cheyenne is reading a book on improving her memory skills. The book teaches a variety of mnemonic devices and memory strategies and encourages the reader to think about which approaches she feels will help her most. In other words, the book suggests that the reader use

Inductive reasoning can never lead to a false conclusion if the premises are true.

Language can be used to create an infinite number of messages that can have novel or new meanings. This quality of language is referred to as

When people develop expertise, their brain functioning changes in ways that increases __________.

How is a combination of inductive and deductive reasoning involved in scientific activity?

The semantic features of a sentence correspond to the shallow structure of language.

If retelling a story to someone that you originally heard from another person, you will probably consider it more important to get the _____ correct, as compared to the _____.

In the classic study on mental rotation, what did Shepard and Metzler find was the relationship between the speed that participants made judgments on whether two shapes were the same or different, and the degree of rotation?

Research on mental rotation has found that the greater the degree of rotation, the less time it takes to judge if two shapes are the same.

Experts depend on their ____________ memory because they rely on learned __________.