Psy 416: Study questions for exam on September 24.
Erwin Segal
Back to syllabus

1. Contrast 'partist' and 'wholist' strategies for identifying a concept.
2. What was James's criterion for evidence of mind?
3. What are some properties of situations that make them problems?
4. What is the Socrates method of teaching someone to solve a problem?
5. What evidence did Külpe and the Würzburg School have that supported the idea that thinking requires directed thought and some unconscious processes?
6. What is "insight" in reasoning?
7. Contrast the Gestalt notion of "parts" and the associationistic notion of "elements."
8. What does a Gestalt psychologist have in mind when s/he discussed the structural analysis of a problem?
9. When the chimpanzee tried to achieve a banana lying outside his cage in Kohler's experiments he made both "good" and "bad" errors. What is the difference between good and bad errors?
10. Why did the geometry students have difficulty when Wertheimer presented a parallelogram with a short side as the base?
11. Give an example of a structural analysis of a problem.
12. What is the Gestalt basic mechanism of problem solving?
13. What is the Gestalt criticism of "stupid" application of rules?
14. What is the Associationist principle of "contiguity"?
15. What is the behaviorist notion of positive reinforcement?
16. How might a habit family hierarchy be modified?
17. How might a connectionist explain why people see two possible cubes in the "Necker cube" rather than many ill-formed structures?
18. How do connectionists explain why people usually do not see that stimuli are ambiguous?
19. Are people more likely to learn Hull's Chinese characters by continuous or noncontinuous processes? Why?
20. How are induction and deduction often differentiated?
21. Compare the manipulation of the stimuli for reversal and nonreversal shifts for the study of transfer to a new principle for a positive concept.
22. Briefly explain the evidence that sometimes reversal shifts are easier and sometimes harder than nonreversal shifts.
23. What is the prototype view of concepts?
24. What is the exemplar view of concepts?
25. What is the classical view of concepts?
26. Differentiate continuity and noncontinuity concepts in concept attainment.
27. What is induction problem solving using an inductive generalization approach?
28. What is induction problem solving using a hypothesis testing approach?
29. Bruner, Goodnow and Austin-- Strategies for concept attainment
30. What is Tversky and Kahneman's "similarity " heuristic?
31. What is Tversky and Kahneman's "availability" heuristic?
32. What is the effect of base rates on the accuracy of probabilistic categorization?
33. How do subjects usually deal with base rates in probabilistic categorization?