Chapter 9- Thinking and Language PDF

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Summary from the psychology textbook by David G Myers...

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Chapter 9: Thinking and Language Section 1- Thinking Question 1- What is cognition, and what are the functions of concepts? (Concepts)

Definitions

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Cognition: All the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating. Concept: A mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or 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 (as when comparing feathered creatures to a prototypical bird, such as a robin).

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Psychologists who study cognition focus on the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating information. We often form our concepts by developing prototypes. Once we place an item in a category, our memory of it later shifts toward the category prototype. When behaviours don’t fit our discrimination prototypes- of white against black, male against female, young against old- we often fail to notice prejudice. People more easily detect males prejudice against females than vice versa. Rose is to flower as prototype is to concept. A rose is a prototypical example of the concept flower.

Question 2- What cognitive strategies assist our problem solving, and what obstacles hinder it? (Problem Solving: Strategies and

Definitions Algorithm: A methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem. Contrasts with the usually speedier- but also more errorprone-use of heuristics. 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. Insight: A sudden realization of a problem’s solution; contrasts with strategy-based solutions. Confirmation Bias: A tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence. Mental Set: A tendency to approach a problem in one particular way, often a way that has been successful in the past.

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Some problems we can solve through trial and error. For other problems, we use algorithms, step-by-step procedures that guarantee a solution. But step-by-step algorithms can be laborious and exasperating. Sometimes we puzzle over a problem and the pieces suddenly fall together in a flash of insight. Half the solutions were by a sudden Aha! Insight. Before the Aha! moment, the problem solvers’ frontal lobes (which are involved in focusing attention) were active, and there was a burst of activity in the right temporal lobe, just above the ear. Insight strikes suddenly, with no prior sense of “getting warmer” or feeling close to a solution. We more eagerly seek out and favor evidence that supports our ideas than evidence that refutes them. Once people form a belief they prefer belief-confirming information. Once we incorrectly represent a problem, it’s hard to restructure how we approach it. As a perceptual set predisposes what we perceive, a mental set predisposes how we think. Obstacles to problem solving include our confirmation bias, which predisposes us to verify rather than challenge our hypotheses, and fixation, such as mental set, which may prevent us from taking the fresh perspective that would lead to a solution. Not being able to take a new perspective when attempting to solve a problem is referred to as fixation. One example of this obstacle to problem solving is the tendency to repeat solutions that have worked previously. A dessert recipe that gives you the ingredients, their amounts, and the steps to follow is an example of an algorithm.

Obstacles)

ProblemSolving Approach Trial and error

How You Would Find Car Keys Using Each Method

Algorithm

Methodically checking every possible location in the house as well as the pockets in your clothes

Randomly looking everywhere in the house

Chapter 9: Thinking and Language Heuristics Insight

Thinking about the most logical place for your to have left your keys Suddenly remembering that you left your keys in the car when you took the groceries out.

Question 3- What is intuition, and how can the availability heuristic, overconfidence, belief perseverance, and framing influence our decisions and judgements? (Forming Good and Bad Decisions and Judgments: The Availability Heuristic, Overconfidence, Belief Perseverance, The Effects of Framing)

Definitions Intuition: An effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or though, as contrasted with explicit, conscious reasoning. 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. Overconfidence: The tendency to be more confident than correct- to over-estimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgments. Belief Perseverance: Clinging to one’s initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited. Framing: The way an issue is posed; how an issue is framed can significantly affect decisions and judgments.

How Does Availability Heuristic Lead us to Make Judgmental Errors? The availability heuristic leads us to estimate the likelihood of events based on how readily they come to mind. Thus, we may think certain ethnic groups are more likely to be terrorists because of the vividness of the events of September 11th 2001

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When we need to act quickly, the mental shortcuts we call heuristics enable snap judgments. Casinos entice us to gamble by signaling even small wins with bells and lights-making them mentally vivid-while keeping big losses invisible. Anything that makes information pop into mind- its vividness, recency, or distinctiveness-can make it seem commonplace. Dramatic outcomes make us gasp; probabilities we hardly grasp. People who err on the side of overconfidence live more happily. The more we come to appreciate why our beliefs might be true, the more tightly we cling to them. Once beliefs form and get justified, it takes more compelling evidence to change them than it did to create them. Framing can be a powerful persuasion tool. Those who understand the power of framing can use it to nudge our decisions. Intuition can be used instead of systematic reasoning. A remedy for belief perseverance is to consider how we might have explained an opposite result. Subtle wording differences can dramatically alter our responses. When research participants are given feedback on the accuracy of their judgments, such feedback generally helps them become more realistic about how much they know. During a televised political debate, the Republican and Democratic candidates each argued that the results of a recent public opinion poll supported their party’s platform regarding sexual harassment. Because both candidates saw the information as supporting their belief, it is clear that both were victims of confirmation bias. The politicians’ preconceptions are biasing their interpretation of the survey results. In relation to ground beef, consumers respond more positively to an ad describing it as “75% lean” than to one referring to its “25% fat” content. This is an example of the framing effect. The way the issue is posed, or framed, has evidently influenced consumers’ judgments. Marilyn was asked to solve a series of 5 math problems. The first four problems could only be solved by a particular sequence of operations. The 5th problem could also be solved following this sequence; however, a much simpler solution was possible. Marilyn did not realize this simpler solution and solved the problem in the way she had solved the first 4. Her problem-solving strategy was hampered by mental set. The number of airline reservations typically declines after a highly publicized airplane crash because people overestimate the incidence of such disasters. In such instances, their decisions are being influenced by the availability heuristic.

Question 4- What factors contribute to our fear of unlikely events? (Thinking Critically: The Fear Factor- Why We Fear the Wrong Things)

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Psychologists have identified four influences that feed fear and cause us to ignore higher risks: o We fear what our ancestral history has prepared us to fear (snakes instead of cigarettes). o We fear what we cannot control (flying instead of driving).

Chapter 9: Thinking and Language Question 5- How do smart thinkers use intuition? (Forming Good and Bad Decisions and Judgments: The Perils and Powers of Intuition)

Review The perils of intuition- irrational fears, cloudy judgments, illogical reasoning- feed gut fears and prejudices. Intuition is analysis “frozen into habit”. Intuition is usually adaptive, enabling quick reactions. Intuition is huge. Our two-track mind makes sweet harmony as smart, critical thinking listens to the creative whispers of our vast unseen mind, and then evaluates evidence, tests conclusions, and plans for the future. As people gain expertise, they grow adept at making quick, shrewd judgements. Smart thinkers welcome their intuitions (which are usually adaptive), but when making complex decisions they gather as much information as possible and then take time to let their two-track mind process all available information. Intuition is implicit knowledge, resulting from experience.

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Question 6- What is creativity, and what fosters it? (Thinking Creatively)

Definitions

Review

Creativity: The ability to produce new and valuable ideas. Convergent Thinking: Narrowing the available problem solutions to determine the single best solution. Divergent Thinking: Expanding the number of possible problem solutions; creative thinking that diverges in different directions.

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Components of Creativity Creative people tend to have expertise, or a solid base of knowledge; imaginative thinking skills, which allow them to see things in new ways, to recognize patterns, and to make connections; intrinsic motivation, or the tendency to focus on the pleasure and challenge of their work; and a venturesome personality that tolerates ambiguity and risk and seeks new experiences. Creative people also have generally benefitted from living in creative environments.

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Intelligence tests, which are intended to assess aptitude and typically demand a single correct answer, require convergent thinking. Creativity tests (How many uses can you think of for a brick) require divergent thinking. Creativity has five components: o Expertise: well-developed knowledge. Furnishes the ideas, images, and phrases we use as mental building blocks. The more blocks we have, the more chances we have to combine them in novel ways. o Imaginative thinking skills: Provide the ability to see things in novel ways, to recognize patterns, and to make connections. o A venturesome personality: Seeks new experiences, tolerates ambiguity and risk, and perseveres in overcoming obstacles. o Intrinsic motivation: Is driven more by interest, satisfaction, and challenge than by external pressures. Creative people focus less on extrinsic motivators-meeting deadlines, impressing people, or making money-than on the pleasure and stimulation of the work itself. o A creative environment: Sparks, supports, and refines creative ideas. Creativity-fostering environments support innovation, team building, and communication. They also minimize anxiety and foster contemplation. For those seeking to boost the creative process, research offers some ideas: o Develop your expertise. o Allow time for incubation. o Set aside time for the mind to roam freely. o Experience other cultures and ways of thinking.

Question 7- What do we know about thinking in other animals? (Do Other Species Share Our Cognitive Skills?)

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Even pigeons-mere birdbrains-can sort objects (pictures of cars, cats, chairs, flowers) into categories, or concepts. Researchers have found at least 39 local customs related the chimpanzee tool use, grooming, and courtship. A baboon known everyone’s voice within its 80-member troop. Great apes and dolphins have demonstrated self-awareness by recognizing themselves in a mirror. Elephants display their abilities to learn, remember, discriminate smells, empathize, cooperate, teach, and spontaneously use tools. Chimpanzees have shown altruism, cooperation, and group aggression. Wolfgang Kohler demonstrated that chimpanzees also exhibit the “Aha!” reaction that characterizes reasoning by insight. Forest-dwelling chimpanzees learn to use different sticks as tools. These behaviours, along with behaviours related to grooming and courtship vary from one group of chimps to another, suggesting the transmission of cultural customs.

Section 2- Language and Thought

Chapter 9: Thinking and Language Question 8- What are the structural components of a language? (Language Structure)

Definitions Language: Our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning. Phoneme: In a language, the smallest distinctive sound unit. Morpheme: In a language, the smallest unit that carries meaning may be a word or a part of a word (such as a prefix). Grammar: In a language, a system of rules that enables us to communicate with and understand others. In a given language, semantics is the set of rules for deriving meaning from sounds, and syntax is the set of rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences.

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In English, 40 or so phenomes can be combined to form more than 100,000 morphemes, which alone or in combination produce the 616,500 words forms in the Oxford English Dictionary. The word “predates” contains 7 phonemes and 3 morphemes. Each sound of the word is a phoneme (note that the second letter “e” does not itself represent a sound); the morphemes are “pre”, which means before, “date”; and “s”, which indicates plural. The sentence “Blue jeans wear false smiles” has correct syntax but incorrect semantics. The sentence, although semantically meaningless, nevertheless follows the grammatical rules of English syntax for combining words into sentences.

Question 9- What are the milestones in language development, and how do we acquire language? (Language Development)

Definitions 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. One-Word Stage: The stage in speech development, from about age 1 to 2, during which a child speaks mostly in single words. Two-Word Stage: Beginning about age 2, the stage in speech which a child speaks mostly in two-word statements. Telegraphic Speech: Early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram- “go car”- using mostly nouns and verbs.

Month (Approximate) 4 10

12 24 24+

Stage Babbles many speech sounds (“ah-goo”) Babbling resembles household language (“mama”) One-word stage (Kitty!) Two-word stage (“Get ball.”) Rapid development into complete sentences.

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Although you use only 150 words for about half of what you say, you probably learned about 60,000 words. The averages (after age 2) to nearly 3500 words each year, or nearly 10 each day. Seldom do we form sentences in our minds before speaking them. Rather we organize them on the fly as we speak. Infants start without language (in fantis means “not speaking”). By about 4 months of age, babies can recognize differences in speech sounds. They can also read lips. Many natural babbling sounds are consonant-vowel pairs formed by bunching the tongue in the front of the mouth. Receptive language is their ability to understand what is said to and about them. Even at six months, long before speaking, many infants recognize object names. At 7 months and beyond, babies grow in their power to do what you and I find difficult when listening to an unfamiliar language, to segment spoken sounds into individual words. Long after the beginnings of receptive language, babies’ productive language, their ability to produce words, matures. They recognize noun-verb differences- as shown by their responses to a misplaced noun or verb. Before nurture molds babies’ speech, nature enables a wide range of possible sounds in the babbling stage. By about 10 months old, infants’ babbling has changed so that a trained ear can identify the household language. At the one-word stage, a single word may equal a sentence. If they get a late start of learning a particular language, such as after receiving a cochlear implant or being adopted by a family in another country, their language development still proceeds through the same sequence. By early elementary school, children understand complex sentences and begin to enjoy humor conveyed by double meaning. All human languages have nouns verbs and adjectives as grammatical building blocks

Question 10- What brain areas are involved in language processing and speech? (The Brain and Language)

Definitions 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.

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Some people with aphasia can speak fluently but cannot read (despite good vision), while others can comprehend what they read but cannot speak. Still others can write but not read, read but not write, read numbers by not letters, or sing but not speak. Paul Broca reported that after damage to an area of the left frontal lobe a person would struggle to speak words while still being able to sing familiar songs and comprehend speech. Carl Wernicke discovered that after damage to an area of the left temporal lobe people could speak only meaningless words. Damage to this area also disrupts understanding. Functional MRI scans show that different neural networks are activated by nouns and verbs (or objects and actions); by different vowels, and by reading stories of visual versus motor experiences. In processing language, as in other forms of information processing, the brain operates by dividing its mental functions- speaking, perceiving, thinking, remembering- into sub functions.

Chapter 9: Thinking and Language Question 11- What do we know about other animal’s capacity for language? (Do Other Species Have Language?)

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Skeptical Arguments for the “Talking Apes”

Humans, alone, also have a version of a gene (FOXP2) that helps enable the lip, tongue, and vocal cord movements of human speech. Humans with a mutated form of this gene have difficulty speaking words. A number of chimpanzees and bonobos have learned to communicate with humans by signing or by pushing buttons wired to a computer, developed vocabularies of nearly 400 words, communicated by stringing these words together, taught their skills to younger animals, and demonstrated some understanding of syntax.

Chimps have acquired only limited vocabularies and –in contrast to childrenhave acquired these vocabularies only with great difficulty. Interpreting chimpanzee signs as language may be little more than the trainers’ wishful thinking. Believers contend that although animals do not have our facility for language, t...