2. Chapter Overview
Concepts
Language and Thought

3. Categories boundaries begin to blur as movement from prototypes occur.
Thinking
Cognition involves the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating.
Concepts help to simplify thinking through mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, and people.
After placing an item in a category, memory gradually shifts it toward a category prototype.
Categories boundaries begin to blur as movement from prototypes occur.
Cognition
All the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating
Concepts
Mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, and people.
New items matched to prototypes for sorting into categories
Prototypes
Mental image or best example of a category
Matching new items to a prototype provides a quick and easy method (feathered creatures to a prototypical bird, such as a robin).

4. Problem Solving: Strategies
An algorithm is a methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees a solution to a problem.
A heuristic is a simpler strategy that is usually speedier than an algorithm but is also more error prone.
Insight is not a strategy-based solution, but rather a sudden flash of inspiration that solves a problem.
Intuition
Is an effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or thought, as contrasted with explicit, conscious reasoning

5. Problem Solving: Obstacles
Confirmation bias predisposes us to verify rather than challenge our hypotheses.
Fixation, such as mental set, may prevent us from taking the fresh perspective that would lead to a solution.
Fixation
Inability to see problem from a fresh perspective
Mental set
Tendency to approach a problem with previously successful mind-set; example of fixation

6. THE Aha! MOMENT
A burst of right temporal lobe EEG activity (yellow area) accompanied insight solutions word problems (Jung-Beeman et al., 2004).
The red dots show placement of the EEG electrodes. The light gray lines show patterns of brain activity during insight.
From Mark Jung-Beeman, Northwestern University and John Kounios, Drexel Univesity

7. Forming Good and Bad Decisions and Judgments
Intuition is an effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or thought, as contrasted with explicit, conscious reasoning.
Availability heuristics can distort judgment by estimating event likelihood based on memory availability.
Overconfidence can impact decisions when confidence outweighs correctness.

8. Forming Good and Bad Decisions and Judgments
Belief perseverance occurs when we cling to beliefs and ignore evidence that proves these are wrong.
Framing sways decisions and judgments by influencing the way an issue is posed. It can also influence beneficial decisions.
Can you think of any such decisions?
Choosing to be an organ donor depending on where you live
Helping employees decide to save for retirement
Developing strategies to save the planet

9. THE FEAR FACTOR—WHY WE FEAR THE WRONG THINGS
We fear what our ancestral history has prepared us to fear.
We fear what we cannot control.
We fear what is immediate.
We fear what is most readily available in memory.
SCARING US ONTO DEADLY HIGHWAYS In the three months after 9/11, those faulty perceptions led more Americans to travel, and some to die, by car. (Adapted from Gigerenzer, 2004.)
Dramatic events are readily available to memory, and they shape our perceptions of risk.
Images of 9/11 etched a sharper image in American minds than did the millions of fatality-free lights on U.S. airlines during 2002 and after.

10. The Perils and Powers of Intuition
Intuition is analysis “frozen into habit.”
Intuition is implicit knowledge.
Intuition is usually adaptive, enabling quick reactions.
Learned associations surface as “gut” feelings.
Intuition is huge.
Critical thinkers are often guided by intuition.

11. And so…
Smart, critical thinking listens to the unseen mind, and then evaluates evidence, tests conclusions, and plans for the future.

12. Thinking Creatively
Creativity is the ability to produce new and valuable ideas.
It is supported by
Aptitude or the ability to learn
Intelligence
Working memory

13. Thinking Creatively Divergent thinking Convergent thinking
Expands the number of possible problem solutions (creative thinking that diverges in different directions)
Convergent thinking
Narrows the available problem solutions to determine the single best solution
Creativity
Is ability to produce new and valuable ideas

14. Thinking Creatively
Robert Sternberg and his colleagues propose five ingredients of creativity.
Expertise
Imaginative thinking skills
Venturesome personality
Intrinsic motivation
Creative environment

15. Do Other Species Share Our Cognitive Skills?
Researchers make inferences about other species’ consciousness and intelligence based on behavior.
Other animals use concepts, numbers, and tools and they transmit learning from one generation to the next.
Other species also show insight, self-awareness, altruism, cooperation, and grief.

16. Do Other Species Share Our Cognitive Skills?
Using concepts and numbers
Several species demonstrate ability to sort (e.g., pigeons and other birds; great apes; humans).
Displaying insight
Humans are not the only species to display insight (e.g., chimpanzees).
Using tools and transmitting culture
Various species have displayed creative tool use (e.g., forest-dwelling chimpanzees; elephants; humans).
Life on white/Alamy

17. Do Other Species Share Our Cognitive Skills?
Other species display many cognitive skills
Voice-recognition in baboon troops
Mirror self-recognition in great apes and dolphins
Displays of learning, remembering, cooperation in elephants

18. Language and Thought Language
Involves our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning
Is used to transmit civilization’s knowledge from one generation to the next
Connect humans

19. Language Structure Three building blocks of spoken language
Phonemes are smallest distinctive sound units in language
Morphemes are smallest language unit that carry meaning.
Grammar is the system of rules that enables humans to communicate with one another.
Semantics: Deriving meaning from sounds
Syntax: Ordering words into sentences

20. When do we learn language?
Receptive language: Infant ability to understand what is said to them around 4 months
Production language: Infant ability to produce words begin around 10 months.
Month (approx.)
Stage 4
Babbles many speech sounds (“ah-goo”) 10
Babbling resembles household language (“ma-ma”) 12
One - word stage (“Kitty!”) 24
Two - word speech (“Get ball.”)
24+
Rapid development into complete sentences
Receptive language
Language moves from simple to complex.
Infants start without language.
By 4 months, babies can recognize different speech sounds and read lips. They show preference for face that matches a sound.
By 7 months and beyond, babies improve in ability to break spoken sounds into words.
Productive language
Matures after receptive language.
At 4 months, babbling stage—not imitation of adult speech.
By 10 months, babbling changed so household language can be identified. Babies lose ability to hear and produce sounds and tones found outside their native language.
One-word stage
By year one, child enters this stage.
Begin to use barely recognizable syllables to communicate.
First words are often nouns that label objects or people.
Two-word stage
Around 18 months, word learning explodes—from word each week to word each day.
Reach two-word stage and use of telegraphic speech by age 24 months.
Speech follows rules of syntax and arrange words in sensible order.
Early elementary school
Understand complex sentences.

21. Productive Language Babbling stage
Beginning at about 4 months, infant spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to the household language
One-word stage
From about age 1 to 2, a child speaks mostly in single words
Two-word stage
Beginning about age 2, a child speaks mostly in two-word statements
Telegraphic speech
Early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram using mostly nouns and verbs.

22. Explaining Language Development
Language diversity
700+ languages worldwide; structurally very different
Chomsky
Argued all languages share basic elements called a universal grammar
Theorized humans are born with predisposition to learn grammar rules; not a built-in specific language

23. Explaining Language Development
Statistical learning
Human infants display the ability to learn statistical aspects of human speech.
Infant brains discern word breaks and analyze which syllables most often go together.
Seven-month-olds can learn simple sentence structures (ABA pattern).
Purestock/Agefotostock
Human infants come with a remarkable capacity to soak up language. But the particular language they learn will reflect their unique interactions with others.

24. How Do We Learn Grammar?
Critical periods suggest childhood represents critical period for mastering certain aspects of language
People who learn a second language as adults usually speak it with the accent of their native language, and they also have difficulty mastering the new grammar.

25. Critical Periods
A.E. Araiza/Arizona Daily Star/AP Photo
NEW LANGUAGE LEARNING GETS HARDER WITH AGE Young children have a readiness to learn language. Ten years after coming to the United States, Asian immigrants took a grammar test. Those who arrived before age 8 understood American English grammar as well as native speakers
did. Those who arrived later did not. (From Johnson & Newport, 1991.)

26. Deafness and Language Development
Late learners show less right hemisphere brain activity in areas related to sign language reading.
Natively Deaf children who learn sign after age 9 do not learn sign language, master basic words, or become as fluent as native signers.
Children born to hearing-nonsigning parents typically do not experience language during early years

27. Deafness and Language Development
Cochlear implants or not?
More than 90 percent of all Deaf children are born to hearing parents who often seek cochlear implants for their children. Deaf culture advocates object to this.
National Association of the Deaf argues deafness is not a disability because native signers are not linguistically disabled.

28. The Brain and Language
Damage to any one of several areas of the brain’s cortex can impair language.
Today’s neuroscience has confirmed brain activity in Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas during language processing.
In processing language, the brain operates by dividing its mental functions into smaller tasks.
In processing language, the brain operates by dividing its mental functions—speaking, perceiving, thinking, remembering—into smaller tasks.

29. BRAIN ACTIVITY WHEN HEARING AND SPEAKING WORDS
Broca’s area controls language expression—an area of the frontal lobe, usually in the left hemisphere, that directs the muscle movements involved in speech.
Wernicke’s area controls language reception—a brain area involved in language comprehension and expression; usually in the left temporal lobe.
Broca’s area
Wernicke’s area

30. Do Other Species Have Language?
Animals display a wide range of comprehension and communication.
Velvet monkeys sound different alarms for different predators.
Chimpanzee (named Washoe) was taught sign language by the Gardners.
Critics noted that ape vocabularies and sentences were simple; vocabulary gained with great difficulties.
Most psychologists agree humans alone possess language.
But only humans communicate in complex sentences. Nevertheless, other animals’ impressive
abilities to think and communicate challenge humans to consider what this means
about the moral rights of other species.

31. Language and Thought
Whorf’s linguistic determinism hypothesis: Language determines basic ideas
Evidence from bilingual speakers suggest people think differently in different languages
Bilingual parents often switch language to express emotions
Words influence, but do not determine, thinking

32. Thinking About Colors
Colors seen in same way but native language used to classify and remember them
Perceived differences expand as different names assigned
Prisma Bildagentur AG/Alamy
In Papua New Guinea, Berinmo children have words for different shades of “yellow,” which might enable them to spot and recall yellow variations more quickly. Here and everywhere, “the languages we speak profoundly shape the way we think, the way we see the world, the way we live our lives,” notes psychologist Lera Boroditsky (2009).

33. Language and Thought Expanding language expands ability to think
Bilingual speakers use executive control over language (bilingual advantage) to inhibit attention to irrelevant information
Language connects the past and the future

34. Thinking in Images
After learning a skill, watching the activity activates the brain’s internal stimulation of it (fMRI research of Calvo-Merino and colleagues, 2004)
Mental rehearsal can aid in academic goal achievement (process stimulation)