Chapter 10: Thinking and Language

1. Chapter 10: Thinking and Language

2. Thinking:

3. How do we form concepts, solve problems and make judgments? • Cognition: The mental activity associated with processing, understanding, and communicating information • Concepts are the mental groups that group similar objects, events, or people

4. Concepts • Concepts provide us with much information without much cognition effort. We form concepts through a • Prototype: mental images that we associate with a certain category. (Ex. A dog is an example of a four legged animal)

5. Solving Problems • Algorithm: a step-by-step procedure that guarantees a solution. This process is slow but you are less likely to make a mistake • Try unscrambling: SPLOYOCHYG

6. Solving Problems • There are about 907,200 resulting permutations… if you used algorithms. We often solve problems using Heuristics which are “rule of thumb” strategies to solve problems and make judgments faster. • We reduce the number of combinations and then we solve using trial and error.

7. Solving Problems • Sudden flashes of inspiration (and that moment when an answer just comes to you after you have been wondering how to solve it) is called Insight • Insight provides a sense of satisfaction: when we solve a difficult problem it makes us happy 

8. Joke/ Example of Insight: • A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods when one of them falls to the ground. He doesn’t seem to be breathing, his eyes are rolled back in his head. The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls emergency services and says “My friend is dead! What can I do?”the operator, in a smooth and calming voice said: “just take it easy, I can help. First let’s make sure he is dead.” there is silence, then a shot is heard. The guys’ voice comes back on and says “ok now what?”

9. Problem Solving Obstacles • Confirmation Bias: a tendency to confirm answers based off expectations, guesses, and one’s perceptions • Fixation: the inability to see a problem from a different perspective. • Mental set: A tendency to approach a problem with a mindset of what has worked in the past • Functional Fixedness: seeing things as their usual functions. Ex: Paperclip = clipping papers together or a hook

10. Decisions/Judgments • To judge the likelihood of things in terms of how they represent or match a particular prototype is called Representativeness heuristic. It can lead one to ignore other relevant information • Someone who is short, slim, and likes to read poetry • Is he a professor at an Ivy league university or a truck driver? • The representative heuristic (enabling you to make a quick judgment) was used because the description seems to represent the professor.

11. Decisions/Judgments • Representative heuristics influence our daily decisions. To judge the likelihood of something, we compare it to our mental representation of that category (Truck drivers for instance). If the two are alike/ match, that fact usually overrides other considerations or logic. • Availability heuristics are when we base our judgments on how mentally available information is. The faster people remember an event, the more they expect it to recur. • Does the letter “K” appear more often as the first or third letter in the English language? • Most assume “k” appears more in the first letter… WRONG!

12. Decisions/Judgments • Overconfidence: the tendency to overestimate the accuracy of our knowledge and judgments • Students are very overconfident on how quickly they can do a project or write a paper. • Hitler was overconfident when he invaded Russia. • The population of New Zealand is more than ___ but less than ___. • 1/3 of the time, people’s estimates with 98% confidence failed to include the right answer

13. Decisions/Judgments • Framing: how information is shown or set up. It can significantly affect decisions and judgments. • 75% lean? Or 25% fat.. • The fact that our judgments can flip-flop is scary! It shows that our judgments may not be well reasoned. • A framed survey question can support or reject a particular viewpoint.

14. Decisions/Judgments • Belief bias: the tendency for our beliefs to distort our logic. Sometimes by making invalid conclusions seem valid, or valid conclusions to seem invalid. (Syllogisms: Premise 1, Premise 2, Conclusion) • God is love. Love is blind. Ray Charles is blind. Ray Charles is God. • Belief Perseverance: clinging to one’s beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. “Consider the opposite” • Can lead to social conflict • Once beliefs form and get justified, it takes more compelling evidence to change them than it did to create them.

15. Intuition • Intuition plays a big role in how we think, more than many people realize. • Instinct can rush reason. Is it always reliable to go with your gut?

16. Language!

17. Language Structure • For a spoken language, there are three building blocks • Phonemes: basic speech sounds • To say the word “bat” we would utter the phoneme sounds “b” “a” and “t” • Morpheme: smallest unit of language that contains meaning • Grammar: a system of rules that enable us to speak and understand • semantics: rules we use to derive meaning from morphemes • syntax: rules we use to order words into sentences

18. Language Development • a process that starts early in human life, when a person begins to acquire language by learning it as it is spoken and by mimicry. • Infants start without language. • Yet by four months of age, babies can read lips and discriminate speech sounds. • The language that infants speak is called “gibberish

20. Language Development • Before age 1, children learn to detect words among the stream of spoken sounds and to discern grammatical rules. Before age 1, children babble with phonemes (of their own language). Infants soak up the language around them, as Peter Jusczyk said, “Little ears are listening.”

21. Language Development • B.F. Skinner • believed that language was learned after birth as a result of making sounds and imitating those around us. • Operant Conditioning- As individuals hear words, they will attempt to repeat them, and with positive reinforcement the infant will eventually develop the correct pronunciation, which will therefore again receive positive reinforcement. • Sounds and words that are not part of the accepted language will not be reinforced and will be lost

22. Language Development • Noam Chomsky thought Skinner's ideas were naïve. Children learn their environments’ language however, they acquire untaught words/grammar at a rate too remarkable to be explained solely by learning principles.

23. Thinking And Language

24. Language Influences Thinking • Benjamin Lee Whorf exclaimed that language determines the way we think. (Language Determinism.) • “To expand language is to expand the ability to think.” • In lower grades, textbooks introduce new words, new ideas, and new ways of thinking • Increasing words in sign language is very beneficial to deaf people

25. Thinking in images • When you go to turn on hot water in a bathroom, which direction do you turn the handle? • You probably didn’t think in words, but in procedural memory: a mental picture of how you do it. Researchers have found that thinking in images is useful especially for mentally practicing upcoming events, which can actually increase skills. • Imagining an activity triggers action in the same brain areas that are triggered when actually performing the activity.

26. Animals Thinking and Language • Animals (especially apes) can display capacities for thinking and can form concepts. • We are not the only creatures to display insight. • Chimps use insight for problem solving, especially in their natural habitat.

27. Arguments for and against animals/humans sharing language capacity • Bees dance to communicate the direction and distance of their food • Parrots sort items by numbers • Some apes have learned sign language to communicate with humans. And taught other animals sign language • ONLY HUMANS CAN MASTER THE VERBAL OR SIGNED EXPRESSION OF COMPLEX RULES OF SYNTAX

28. THE END !