Exam 8: B: Language and Thought

What are people doing if a mental set interferes with problem solving?

Anders is betting Mischa on whether a tossed coin will land on heads or tails. Anders has bet heads the last four times and has lost each time. If on the next toss he bets heads again and says, "It's got to be heads, heads is overdue," what does his reasoning illustrate?

What is illustrated by the boy's statement, "This book"?

If you are asked to come up with one word that is typically paired with taxi, screw and cattle (the answer is 'driver'), what sort of problem are you solving?

Alexis has been diagnosed with a learning disability. She doesn't believe that the psychologist was accurate in this diagnosis, so she decided to seek out additional information about the disability, and its rate of misdiagnosis. She finds a number of websites and a couple of books that suggest that the diagnosis for the particular disability is wrong 20 percent of the time. Alexis is confident that hers is a case of misdiagnosis, and even after getting three additional evaluations from other diagnosticians (who all agree with the original diagnosis), Alexis refuses to believe otherwise. What does this example illustrate?

When is the trial-and-error approach to problem solving most effective?

In which class of problems is it necessary to carry out a sequence of intermediate actions in order to solve the problem?

Children produce various errors like overregularizations that they would not have heard from the adults or other models around them. Which of the following theories of language acquisition is WEAKENED by this evidence?

Which class of problems (as described by Greeno) involves discovering the relations among the parts of the problem?

Around what age do children typically start to understand and use ironic or sarcastic statements?

If you were asked to rearrange the letters EDTIMRM in order to produce an English word (MIDTERM), what sort of problem are you trying to solve?

Which class of problems is often solved with a burst of insight?

Which type of strategy is especially useful when a problem has a well-specified end point?

Which heuristic is reflected in our tendency to overestimate the probability of improbable events?

If you are using the availability heuristic, what are you using to estimate the probability of an event?

What are the smallest speech units in a language that can be distinguished perceptually?

Which of the following statements is the best example of telegraphic speech?

According to evolutionary psychologists, what is the human mind designed to handle?

Johanna was placed in charge of planning her class's spring formal. If she thought she should hire the same band that played at last year's formal because of how much everyone enjoyed the band, which barrier to effective problem solving might Johanna be encountering?

Which strategy do people tend to use when making a decision involving relatively few options?