Thinking and Language Chapter 10 By: Rachelle Stoker

Thinking Cognition refers to all the mental activities associated with processing, understanding, remembering, and communicating. What are the psychologists called that study cognition?

Cognitive psychologists study these mental activities and both the logical and the illogical way we form concepts, solve problems, make decisions, and form judgments. Concepts- mental groupings similar objects events and people. Example: What do you picture when I say the word chair? Another Example?

Prototypes- a mental image or best example that incorporates all the features we associate with a category. Example: Attractive man- tall, dark, handsome etc. Another example?

Solving Problems Algorithm -A step by step procedure that guarantees a solution. -Example: When unscrambling letters to form words try each possibility -Pro: guarantees a solution. -Cons: time consuming, exasperating, complex -Other examples? Heuristic -A simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently. -Example: When unscrambling letters to form words eliminating the option of putting two y’s together. -Pros: speedy, more convenient -Con: more error prone -Other examples?

Insight: a sudden and often novel realization of the solution to a problem; it contrasts with strategy-based solutions. Provides a sense of satisfaction. Everyone has an example, someone share.

Obstacles to Problem Solving Confirmation Bias: a tendency to search for information that confirms one’s preconceptions. Example: Most people who adopt end up having children later on, search for examples to confirm. Another example? Fixation: the inability to see a problem from a new perspective. Functional fixedness: the tendency to think of things only in terms of their usual functions What can you use a fork for other than eating?

Mental set: the tendency to repeat solutions that have worked in the past. Example: Girl crying to get out of ticket = Girl crying to get out of a bad predicament with her boyfriend.

Making Decisions and Forming Judgments Representativeness heuristic: judging the likelihood of things in terms of how well they seem to represent, or match, particular prototypes; may lead one to ignore other relevant information. Availability heuristic: estimating the likelihood of events based on their availability in our memory. Examples?

Overconfidence: the tendency to be more confident than correct- to overestimate the accuracy of one’s beliefs and judgments. Framing: the way an issue is posed; how an issue is framed can significantly affect decisions and judgments. Example: More likely to think birth control is successful if it has a 95% rate, than a 5% failure rate.

Belief Bias Belief Bias: the tendency for one’s preexisting beliefs to distort logical reasoning, sometimes by making invalid conclusions seem valid or valid conclusions seem invalid. Example: Mrs. Cale’s belief that Hawaii is off the coast of Florida. Other examples? Belief Perseverance: clinging to one’s initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) AI: the science of designing and programming computer systems to do intelligent things and to simulate human thought processes, such as intuitive reasoning, learning, and understanding language.

Two Facets Practical: industrial robots that can “sense” their environment; “expert systems” that can carry out chemical analyses, offer tax planning advice etc. Theoretical: pioneered by psychologist Herbert Simon; the goal is a unified theory of cognition embodied in a computer system that can process information, solve problems, learn from experience, and remember

Humans Vs. Computers Brains: Does many things at once; has emotions and feelings; reflect on its own existence Computers: faster than neural impulses; process things serially (one at a time); precise logic

Computer Neural Networks: Someone tell me what they are!!!!! Page pieces of candy!

Language Our spoken, written, or signed words and ways we combine them as we think and communicate. Three Building Blocks: Phonemes: sounds Morpheme: smallest unit that has meaning –ed, ing, the, a, I Grammar: Semantics and Syntax, Semantics- rules by which we derive meaning from morphemes Syntax: rules for combining words into sentences that make sense.

Language Development Three Stages: Babbling Stage: 3-4 months basically just sounds. Example of a babble? One-Word Stage: 12 – 24 months, single words. Example. Two-Word Stage/ Telegraphic speech: nouns and verbs spoken like a telegram. Example? Fun Facts: before 10 months cannot decipher the origin of the language the baby is speaking (babble stage). Without exposure to other languages, we become deaf to speech sounds outside our native language.

Theories of Language Development Skinner: Operant Learning: Believed that we can explain language development with learning principles, such as association, imitation, and reinforcement. Chomsky: Inborn Universal Grammar: Language is almost entirely inborn. Skinner’s cannot be because we do not teach our children to say certain things such as “I hate you Daddy”. Our 6000 languages are therefore dialects of the Universal grammar for which our brains are prewired.

Cognitive Neuroscientists: Statistical Learning: Language can somewhat be inborn and somewhat learned. There are facts and experiments done that support some to some point. It is important to learn language before the age of _____? Tell me the age.

Thinking and Language Linguistic Determinism: Whorf’s hypothesis that language determines the way we think. -To say that language determines the way we think is much too strong. But our words INFLUENCE what we think. To expand language is expanding the ability to think. -Knowing more than one language improves self esteem.

Thinking Without Language Some thought does not need words to accomplish. When you think about how to turn on your faucet you do it through mental images. Mentally practicing things improves performance. Implicit memories and activities are thought about in pictures. Thinking affects our language which then affects our thought.

Animal Thinking and Language Summary: Animals think, but not as complex as humans do. They all have there own ways of communicating not at all like our Language. Animals can learn things like counting such as apes. Honeybees communicate through dancing.

The End