Thinking and Language

1. Chapter 9 Thinking and Language PSYCHOLOGY David G. Myers C. Nathan DeWall Twelfth Edition

2. Chapter Overview • Thinking • Language and Thought

3. Thinking • Cognition: All the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating. • Concept: A mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, and people. • 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. • Category boundaries begin to blur as movement from prototypes occurs.

4. Categorizing Faces Influences Recollection

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. The Aha! Moment • A burst of right temporal lobe EEG activity (yellow area) accompanied insight into solutions to 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.

8. Forming Good and Bad Decisions andJudgments (part 1) • Intuition: An effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or thought, as contrasted with explicit, conscious reasoning. • Representativeness heuristic: Estimating the likelihood of events in terms of how well they seem to represent, or match, particular prototypes; it may lead us to ignore other relevant information. • 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.

9. Overconfidence • Overconfidence: The tendency to be more confident than correct—to overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgments. • Can feed political views (Kahneman, 2015) • Drives stockbrokers and investment managers to market their ability to outperform the stock market, which they cannot (Malkiel, 2016) • Has strong adaptive value

10. Forming Good and Bad Decisions andJudgments (part 2) • Belief perseverance occurs when we cling to beliefs and ignore evidence that proves these beliefs 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?

11. 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.

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

13. Thinking Creatively (part 1) • Creativity is the ability to produce new and valuable ideas. • It is supported by • Aptitude or the ability to learn • Intelligence • Working memory

14. Thinking Creatively (part 2) • Divergent 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

15. Thinking Creatively (part 3) • Robert Sternberg and colleagues propose five ingredients of creativity: • Expertise • Imaginative thinking skills • Venturesome personality • Intrinsic motivation • Creative environment

16. Comparing Cognitive Processes and Strategies

17. Do Other Species Share Our Cognitive Skills? (part 1) • Researchers make inferences about other species’ consciousness and intelligence based on behavior. • Other animals use concepts, numbers, and tools. • They transmit learning from one generation to the next. • They show insight, self-awareness, altruism, cooperation, and grief.

18. Do Other Species Share Our Cognitive Skills? (part 2) • 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).

19. Do Other Species Share Our Cognitive Skills? (part 3) • Other cognitive skills • Voice recognition in baboon troops • Mirror self-recognition in great apes and dolphins • Displays of learning, remembering, and cooperation in elephants

20. 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 • Connects humans

21. Language Structure • Three building blocks of spoken language • Phoneme: Smallest distinctive sound unit in language. • Morpheme: Smallest language unit that carries meaning. • Grammar: The system of rules that enables humans to communicate with one another. • Semantics: Deriving meaning from sounds • Syntax: Ordering words into sentences

22. Language Development (part 1) • Language diversity • 6000-plus languages worldwide; structurally very different • Chomsky • Argued all languages share basic elements called a universal grammar • Theorized humans are born with a predisposition to learn grammar rules, not a built-in specific language

23. Productive Language • Babbling stage • Beginning at about 4 months, an 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 at 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.

24. When Do We Learn Language? • Receptive language: Infants’ ability to understand what is said to them begins around 4 months. • Production language: Infants’ ability to produce words begins around 10 months. Table 9.2: Summary of Language Development

25. Language Development (part 2) • Children learn grammar as they discern patterns in the language they hear (Ibbotson & Tomasello, 2016). • 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.

26. How Do We Learn Grammar? • Critical periods: Childhood is a 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 have difficulty mastering the new grammar. • Children exposed to low-quality language—such as 4-year-olds in classrooms with 3-year-olds, or some children from impoverished homes—often display less language skill (Ansari et al., 2015; Hirsh-Pasek et al., 2015).

27. New Language Learning Gets Harder with Age

28. Deafness and Language Development(part 1) • Children born to hearing, nonsigning parents typically do not experience language during their early years. • Natively Deaf children who learn signing after age 9 do not learn sign language, master basic words, or become as fluent as native signers. • Late learners show less right hemisphere brain activity in areas related to sign language reading.

29. Deafness and Language Development(part 2) • 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 intervention. • The National Association of the Deaf argues deafness is not a disability because native signers are not linguistically disabled.

30. The Brain and Language (part 1) • 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.

31. The Brain and Language (part 2) • Aphasia: Impairment of language, usually caused by left hemisphere damage either to Broca’s area (impairing speaking) or to Wernicke’s area (impairing understanding) • 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.

32. Brain Activity When Hearing and Speaking Words

33. 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 note that ape vocabularies and sentences are simple; vocabulary is gained with great difficulties. • Most psychologists agree humans alone possess language.

34. Thinking and Language • Whorf’s linguistic determinism hypothesis: Language determines basic ideas. • Evidence from bilingual speakers suggests that people think differently in different languages. • Bilingual parents often switch languages to express emotions. • Bilingual children exhibit enhanced social skills, by being better able to shift to understand another’s perspective (Fan et al., 2015). • Words influence, but do not determine, thinking.

35. Thinking About Colors • Colors are seen in the same way, but native language is used to classify and remember them. • Perceived differences expand as different names are assigned.

36. Language and Thought • Expanding language expands the 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.

37. 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).