1. Cognition: language and thinking
AP Psychology
Mr. Fuller

2. Language Acquisition
One of the defining characteristics of humans is the use of complex language-our ability to communicate.
Newborn children know zero words in English, or any other language. Yet they have innate abilities to become fluent speakers of any language they hear spoken, or signed regularly.

3. Innateness-Theory of Language
According to the innateness-theory of language, children acquire language not only by imitating but also by following preprogrammed steps to acquire language.
Noam Chomsky-Language Acquisition Device-LAD: a mental structure that facilitates the learning of language because it is preprogrammed with fundamental language rules.
Globally, all children follow the same pattern of language acquisition.
LAD is flexible-any language is possible

4. Language
Language is our spoken, written, or gestured works and the way we combine them to communicate meaning.
Phoneme is the smallest distinctive sound unit
Morpheme is the smallest unit that carries meaning
may be a word or a part of a word (such as a prefix)
-ed/-d = past tense; -s = plural
Grammar is a system of rules in a language that enables us to communicate with and understand other

5. Language
Semantics is the set of rules by which we derive meaning from morphemes, words, and sentences in a given language.
also, the study of meaning
Syntax is the rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences in a given language.
Do you want to go to the store? vs. Store to go want to do you?

6. Stages of Early language
Summary of Language Development
Month
(approximate)
Stage 4 10 12 24
24+
Babbles many speech sounds.
Babbling reveals households
language.
One-word stage.
Two-word, telegraphic speech (water now! Give toy).
Language develops rapidly into
complete sentences.

7. Language Stages
There are four phases of early speech acquisition that all students pass through:
Babbling Stage
Beginning at 3 to 4 months
The stage of speech development in which the infant spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to the household language, but noises that represent every sound heard in every language
One-Word Stage
From about age 1 to 2
The stage in speech development during which a child speaks mostly in single words

8. Language Two-Word Stage Beginning about age 2
The stage in speech development during which a child speaks in mostly two-word statements
Telegraphic Speech
Early speech stage in which the child speaks like a telegram-–“go car”--using mostly nouns and verbs and omitting “auxiliary” words

9. Cognition
How do we think?

10. Cognition: Thinking
A concept is a mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people
Prototype is a mental image or best example of a category-formed on the basis of frequently experienced features.
Testing concepts can be hard since they are not observable. We must infer their influence on people’s thinking indirectly by studying their observable side effects.
Concept of the color red
What is a car?
How is a car different from a truck?
What is an El Camino?

11. El Camino

12. Types of Concepts There are two types of concepts
Natural concepts: imprecise mental classifications that develop out of our everyday experiences.
Most of the concepts in our everyday life
Artificial concepts: concepts defined by a set of rules or characteristics, such as dictionary definition or mathematical equations.
Most of the concepts learned in school

13. Cognitive Maps
Cognitive maps are mental representations of a given place or situation.
Just the mental image is not enough however. Along with the visual cortex, the frontal lobe of the brain provides us with information on the episode, the context and stimulus of a situation.
Ex. Answering the phone at a friends house

14. Making Inferences
To help us figure out the episode, the context and stimulus of a situation we do have tools:
Schema: General frameworks that provide expectations about topics, events, objects, people and situations.
Script: Schemas about sequences of events and actions expected to occur in particular settings.

15. Problem Solving
When we are faced with a problem, we have a few options for figuring out a solution.
Algorithms: Problem solving procedures or formulas that guarantee a correct outcome if correctly applied
Heuristics: Simple, basic rules that serve as shortcuts to solve complex mental tasks.
They do not guarantee a correct solution

16. Algorithms vs. Heuristics
Unscramble
S P L O Y O C H Y G
Algorithm
all 907,208 combinations
Heuristic
throw out all YY combinations
other heuristics?

17. (in case you didn’t figure that out!!!)
PSYCHOLOGY
(in case you didn’t figure that out!!!)

18. Try This:

19. The Candle-Mounting Problem
Using these materials, how would you mount the candle on a bulletin board?

20. Problems with Heuristics
One problem with heuristic are mental sets.
When faced with problems, we have a tendency to approach it in a familiar way. Especially a way that has been successful in the past but may or may not be helpful in solving a new problem
Mental set: the tendency to respond to a new problem in the manner used for previous problems.

21. Problems With Heuristics
Another problem with relying on heuristics is called functional fixedness, a sort of mental set issue.
Functional Fixedness: The inability to perceive a new use for an object associated with a different purpose.

22. The Candle-Mounting Problem
Solving this problem requires recognizing that a box need not always serve as a container

23. Judging and Decision making
Along with mental sets, bias can make heuristics a faulty decision making tool.
Confirmation bias: Tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence.
Belief perseverance: clinging to one’s initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited
Hindsight bias: Tendency to second guess a decision after the event has happened.
Representative bias: Judging the likelihood of things in terms of how well they seem to match particular prototype
Availability bias: Estimating the likelihood of events based on their availability in memory
if instances come readily to mind we presume such events are common

24. Solve These

25. Do This: Use psych to learn psych
Mnemonic are memory aids that use imagery and organizational devices
Create a mnemonic device to remember:
1) Language terms: grammar, semantics, syntax, phoneme, morpheme,