Cognition • Mental activities associated with thinking, remembering, and communicating information • Metacognition: Thinking about thinking Concept • Collection of stimuli that evoke a similar response • Mental groupings of similar objects, events, ideas, or people • We often develop a concept by developing a prototype • Mental image or best example of concept in our mind Problem Solving • Algorithms: Step-by-Step processing • Heuristics: Breaking down into simpler units • Insight: The abrupt, true-seeing, and satisfying solution when all the puzzle pieces fall together SPLOYOCHYG Confirmation Bias • More likely to seek evidence for our ideas than we seek evidence against them 2-4-6 Intuition • Fast, automatic unreasoned feelings and thoughts • Heuristics enable us to make snap judgements Representativeness Heuristic • Judge the likelihood of something being similar to a particular prototype Imagine: short, slim, likes to read poetry Is this more likely to be an Ivy League university English professor truck driver? Nisbett & Ross, 1980 Representativeness Heuristic • Many people guess English professor because it fits a prototype • Fail to consider the base rate of the number of Ivy League English professors (under 400 professors compared to 3.5 million truck drivers) Availability Heuristic • Estimating the commonality of an event based on its mental availability • Vividness, recency, or distinctives can make it seem commonplace Availability Heuristic • Casinos broadcasting infrequent wins with flashing lights • Distorted judgment: After one celebrity’s vaccinated child later developed autism, thousands found her story more memorable than scientific data • What is scarier? Toddlers or Terrorists? • Armed toddlers killed more Americans than did foreign terrorists in 2015 2016 Fixation and Mental Set • Tendency to attempt to fix a problem with the way that worked for us in the past and struggle to have a fresh perspective O-T-T-F-?-?-? O-T-T-F-F(ive)-S(ix)-S(even) J-F-M-A-?-?-? Thinking and Persuasion • Overconfidence • Tendency to overestimate the accuracy of our knowledge and judgement • Belief Perseverance • Tendency to cling to believes in the face of contrary evidence Effects of Framing • The way an issue is presented can be a powerful persuasion • Saving for retirement (Companies now require opt out) • Making moral decisions (Being asked to donate money after being asked what is morally right in this situation?) • Organ donors (Opt-out option produces nearly 100% of people as organ donors compared to opt-in) • Reducing alcohol consumption (People often count their number of drinks not size, a British study reduced drinking by decreasing drink size) Creativity • Ability to produce ideas that are both novel and valuable • Convergent Thinking: Ability to provide a single correct answer • Divergent Thinking: Ability to consider many different options Mental activities associated with thinking, remembering, and communicating information is: Cognition or Metacognition Most of us would disagree that this qualifies as a concept of a shark because it does not fit our __________________. After buying a Subaru, Susan tells her husband that she sees Subaru's everywhere! Susan looking for evidence that everyone has bought a Subaru demonstrates what? Desmond is very afraid to fly after hearing about a plane crash that was broadcasted on every channel for three days straight before his trip. This is what type of Heuristic? Representativeness or Availability? When faced with a problem, Reggie likes to consider all of his options before deciding. He is using______________ thinking. Divergent or Convergent The tendency to overestimate how much one knows about a particular subject is? Language and Thought Language Structure • Phonemes • Smallest distinctive sound unit in language (e.g., “b”) • Morphemes • Smallest language units that carry meaning (e.g., the) • Grammar • Language's set of rules, ordering Language Acquisition • Humans can learn language with remarkable efficiency • Interesting, we intuitively follow similar syntax rules • All human languages (over 6000 of them) have nouns, verbs, and adjectives • Noam Chomsky (Linguist) argues that we are born with a predisposition to learn universal grammar How many words in your native language did you learn between your first birthday and high school graduation? Language Development • About 60,000! • Although we only use about 150 words • After age 2, we earl about 3,500 words a year or nearly 10 a day • Although your teachers probably only explicitly taught you about 200 words Language Development • Receptive Language: Recognizing speech sounds (by 4 months of age) • Comprehension outweighs their production • Productive Language: Ability to produce words • Babbling stage of consonant-vowel pairings at about 4 months of age • One-word stage at about 1 year • At about 18 months, children enter two-word stage and learn about a word a week to a word per day • Critical period for language development • Acquisition of new language-window typically closes around 7 years old Brain and Language • Aphasia: Damage to several cortical areas can produce impairment of language Thinking & Language- Which comes first? Do our ideas come first and then the words to name them? Linguistic Determinism • Benjamin Lee Whorf: Language itself shapes a person’s ideas • Example: The Hopi, who have no past tense for their verbs could not readily think about the past • Many feel this is too extreme: We can all think of things we do not have the words for Linguistic Relativism • Words influence our thinking • Example: Languages (e.g., English) that have more words centered about self-focused emotions compared to languages (e.g., Japanese) that have more interpersonal emotions focused on sympathy • May influence their thinking Do we think in images or words? The ability to understand what we hear without being able to produce the sounds is: Receptive Language or Productive Language The critical window for learning language is from birth to middle school. True or False. We use about how many words? Human languages differ greatly in terms of syntax and structure. True or False.

Thinking & Language

Related Documents

Recommended Documents

Description

Related Documents

Free up your schedule!

Take 5 seconds to unlock