1. Unit 7B: Cognition: Thinking, Problem Solving, Creativity, and Language

2. Unit Overview Thinking Language Thinking and Language
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3. Introduction
Cognition (thinking)
Cognitive psychologists

4. Thinking

5. Concepts Concepts Category hierarchies Some concepts
form by definition
prototype

6. Solving Problems Strategies
Algorithms
Step-by-step
Heuristic
How can an heuristic lead to racial profiling?
Insight
pine, crab, sauce

7. Solving Problems Creativity
Sternberg’s five components
Expertise
Imaginative thinking skills
A venturesome personality
Intrinsic motivation
A creative environment

8. Solving Problems Obstacles to Problem Solving
Confirmation bias
Fixation
Mental set
Functional fixedness

9. Solving Problems Obstacles to Problem Solving
Confirmation bias
Fixation
Mental set
Functional fixedness

10. True or False 1. Barak Obama is the President of the United States. 2
True or False 1. Barak Obama is the President of the United States. 2. Tom Corbett is the governor of Pennsylvania. 3. Luke Ravenstahl is the mayor of Pittsburgh. 4. Mr. Finch is the principal of Hampton High School. 5. Stephen Harper is the Prime Minister of Canada Psychologists interviewed 30 engineers and 100 lawyers. One of them, Jack, is a 45 year old married man with 4 children. He is generally conservative, cautious, and ambitious. He shows no interest in politics or social issues and spends most of his free time on home carpentry, sailing, and solving mathematical puzzles. What is the probability that Jack is one of the 30 engineers?

11. Making Decisions and Forming Judgments Using and Misusing Heuristics
The Representative Heuristic
Base rate fallacy: tendency to judge the probability of an event based entirely upon irrelevant information, instead of the base rate probability of that event.

12. Which of the following are the more frequent causes of death in the United States?
All accidents or strokes? ____% certain
Suicide or blood poisoning? _____% certain
Homicide or diabetes? ____% certain
Motor vehicle accident or colorectal cancer? ____% certain
Drowning or leukemia? ____% certain
Which city has the higher crime rate?
Chicago, IL or Kansas City, MO? ____% certain
Las Vegas, NV or Stockton, CA? ____% certain
Miami, FL or Phoenix, AZ? ____% certain
Honolulu, HI or Raleigh, NC ____% certain
New York, NY or Aurora, IL? ____% certain

13. Making Decisions and Forming Judgments Using and Misusing Heuristics
The Availability Heuristic

14. The anchoring heuristic
* people make decisions based on certain ideas or
standards they hold, ideas or standards that
serve as an anchor for them
* beliefs about politics, religion . . .

15. Making Decisions and Forming Judgments Overconfidence

16. Making Decisions and Forming Judgments The Belief Perseverance Phenomenon
Consider the opposite

17. Making Decisions and Forming Judgments The Perils and Powers of Intuition
Unconscious intuition

18. Making Decisions and Forming Judgments The Effects of Framing
Framing experiments

19. Language

20. Language Introduction
6800 estimated languages
250 spoken by more than 1 million people
66% of world’s children are bilingual

21. Language Structure Phonemes
English about 40 phonemes
“d”, “ch”, “sh”, . . .
How many phonemes in “this”?
consonant phonemes carry more information than vowel phonemes
The treth ef thes stetemant shad be evedent fram thes brif demenstretien.

22. Language Structure Morphemes
Includes prefixes and suffixes
“cat”, “pre-”, “-ed”

23. Language Structure Grammar
Semantics
surface structure
deep structure
“They were hunting dogs.”
Syntax

24. Language Development When Do We Learn Language?
Receptive language
Productive language
Babbling stage
One-word stage
Two-word stage
Telegraphic speech
60,000 words between age 1 and graduation

25. Language Development When Do We Learn Language?

26. Language Development Explaining Language Development
Skinner: Operant Learning
Learning principles
Association
Imitation
Reinforcement

27. Language Development Explaining Language Development
Chomsky: Inborn Universal Grammar
Language acquisition device

28. Language Development Explaining Language Development
Statistical Learning and Critical Periods
Statistical learning
Critical (sensitive) period

29. Thinking and Language

30. Language Influences Thinking
Whorf’s linguistic determinism
Bilingual advantage

31. Thinking in Images
Implicit memory

32. The End

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34. Teacher Information
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Throughout this presentation there are slides, usually of graphics or tables, that build on one another. These are included for three purposes.
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Please feel free to contact me at with any questions, concerns, suggestions, etc. regarding these presentations.
Kent Korek
Germantown High School
Germantown, WI 53022

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38. Definition Slide
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39. Definition Slides

40. Cognition
= the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating.

41. Concept
= a mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people.

42. Prototype
= a mental image or best example of a category. Matching new items to a prototype provides a quick and easy method for sorting items into categories (as when comparing feathered creatures to a prototypical bird, such as a robin).

43. Algorithm
= a methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem. Contrasts with the usually speedier – but also more error-prone – use of heuristics.

44. Heuristic
= a simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently; usually speedier but also more error-prone than algorithms.

45. Insight
= a sudden and often novel realization of the solution to a problem; it contrasts with strategy-based solutions.

46. Creativity
= the ability to produce novel and valuable ideas.

47. Confirmation Bias
= a tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence.

48. Fixation
= the inability to see a problem from a new perspective, by employing a different mental set.

49. Mental Set
= a tendency to approach a problem in one particular way, often a way that has been successful in the past.

50. Functional Fixedness
= the tendency to think of things only in terms of their usual functions; an impediment to problem solving.

51. Representativeness Heuristic
= judging the likelihood of things in terms of how well they seem to represent, or match, particular prototypes; may lead us to ignore other relevant information.

52. Availability Heuristic
= estimating the likelihood of events based on their availability in memory; if instances come readily to mind (perhaps because of their vividness), we presume such events are common

53. Overconfidence
= the tendency to be more confident that correct – to over-estimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgments.

54. Belief Perseverance
= clinging to one’s initial conceptions after the basis on which they are formed has been discredited.

55. Intuition
= an effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or thought, as contrasted with explicit, conscious reasoning.

56. Framing
= the way an issue is posed; how an issue is framed can significantly affect decisions and judgments.

57. Language
= our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning.

58. Phoneme
= in language, the smallest distinctive sound unit.

59. Morpheme
= in a language, the smallest unit that carries meaning; may be a word or a part of a word (such as a prefix).

60. Grammar
= in a language, a system of rules that enables us to communicate with and understand others.

61. Semantics
= the set of rules by which we derive meaning from morphemes, words, and sentences in a given language; also, the study of meaning.

62. Syntax
= the rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences in a given language.

63. Babbling Stage
= beginning at about 4 months, the stage of speech development in which the infant spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to the household language.

64. One-word Stage
= the stage in speech development, from about age 1 to 2, during which a child speaks mostly in single words.

65. Two-word Stage
= beginning about age 2, the stage in speech development during which a child speaks mostly two-word statements.

66. Telegraphic Speech
= early speech state in which a child speaks like a telegram – “go car” – using mostly nouns and verbs.

67. Linguistic Determinism
= Whorf’s hypothesis that language determines the way we think.