Chapter 8 Thinking Reasoning and Language Thinking Defined as any mental activity or processing of information o Learning remembering perceiving communicating believing and deciding All fundamental aspects of cognition Cognitive Economy refers to the combined simplicity and relevance of a categorization scheme or knowledge representation We economize mentally in a variety of ways that reduce mental effort but enable us to get things right most of the time We are cognitive misers we try to spend as little brain power as possible o This can cause trouble by oversimplifying things Heuristics shortcuts in thinking o They allow us to simplify what we attend to and keep the information we need for decision making to a manageable minimum o Cognitive Biases predispositions and default expectations that we use to interpret our experiences that operate our everyday lives o Representativeness Heuristic involves judging the probability of an event based on how prevalent that event has been in a past experience Base rate how common a behavior or characteristic is in general Sometimes our representativeness heuristic is wrong because we are poor at taking into account base rate information o Availability Heuristic we estimate the likelihood of an occurrence based on how easily it comes to mind o Hindsight Bias our tendency to overestimate how accurately we could have predicted something happening once we already know the outcome o Confirmation Bias our tendency to seek out evidence that supports our hypotheses or beliefs and to deny and dismiss evidence that doesn t Top Down Processing our brain utilizes previous knowledge to help us learn about a new situation o Includes the use of concepts our knowledge and ideas about objects actions and characteristics that share core properties and the use of schemas concepts we ve stored in memory about how certain actions objects and ideas relate to each other As we acquire knowledge we create schemas that enable us to draw on our knowledge when we encounter something new Decision Making The process of selecting among a set of alternatives o Framing influences our decision making Framing how we formulate the question about what we need to decide o Ex Stating survival rate vs death rate changes the way people think about a surgery Problem Solving Generating a cognitive strategy to accomplish a goal 2 We solve many problems by following algorithms step by step procedures o Ex Recipes and surgery Breaking down a big problem into smaller problems can help too Obstacles to problem solving include o Salience of Surface Similarities the tendency to focus on the surface similarities superficial properties of problems and trying to solve them in similar ways as previous problems Ex A general wants to capture a fortress but realizes that all of his down path them taking forces one makes vulnerable so he divides his troops into smaller units and puts them on multiple paths o Mental Sets getting stuck in a specific problem solving strategy and not thinking outside the box Ex 3 o Functional Fixedness when we experience difficulty conceptualizing that an object typically used for one purpose can serve another purpose Ex Ever needed a hammer or tape and not realized you could use a shoe as a hammer or mailing label as tape Language A system of communications that combines symbols in rule based ways to create meaning o It tends to be arbitrary its sounds words and sentences have no relation to its meaning o It is structured governed by a system of rules such as the order of letters in a word or the order of words to make a sentence o It is generative it expresses limitless meanings can convey new ideas and allows for creation of endless new sentences It allows for the transmission of information and serves in key emotional and social functions We don t even realize how complex language is until we try to learn a new one Levels of Language 4 Phonemes the sounds of our language o 46 phonemes in English language o 1002 200 world wide Morphemes conveys information about semantics created by stringing phonemes together o Semantics meaning derived from words and sentences o Can be full words dog or modifiers dog s dogs Syntax rules of language by which we construct sentences o Includes word order and modifiers that change the tense of a Extralinguistic elements critical to interpreting meaning but not word part of content o Facial Expressions o Gestures o Grammar o Previous statements Language Dialects There is a variation of some languages used by people based on specific geographic areas social groups or ethnic backgrounds o Slight variations in pronunciation vocabulary and syntax Language Acquisition Because language requires a lengthy learning period and hefty brainpower but we still use it the pros must outweigh the cons o Pros allows us to communicate very complex thoughts It is very hard to determine where language even came from because it is so arbitrary Children and Language Children are better at learning language than older people because they are in a critical period windows of development during which an organism must learn an ability if its going to learn at all In the womb 1 yrs old 2 yrs old 3 5 Sentences become more complex Vocabulary explosion Two word syntax By 5 years old they know grammar Learn Mom s voice Learn their native language sounds They will recognize a frequently read story Special Language Learning Babbling any intentional vocalization that lacks meaning Babies babble in their Native Language phonemes Learn to control the noises they make Start to produce words One word speech Comprehension precedes production Children learn to recognize words long before they can produce them themselves Sign Language A linguistic system of communication with its own phonemes words syntax and extralinguistic information o Has a complex set of syntactic rules that determine when a string of signs is a grammatical sentence Bilingualism fluency in two languages o Pros know two languages increased metalinguistic insight awareness of how language is structured and used better performance on language tasks o Cons slows some aspects of the acquisition process in each particular language Theories of Language Acquisition Imitation kids learn by imitating o Doesn t account for generativity language isn t just a set of predefined sentences that we can pull out and apply in appropriate contexts 6 Nativism babies are born with some basic knowledge of how language works
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