Thinking

Concepts

LOQ: What is cognition, and what are the functions of concepts?

Psychologists who study cognition, focus on the mental activities associated with thinking knowing remembering and communicating information

• Mental groupings of similar objects events ideas or people is one of these concepts

• Concepts such as anger give us much more information with little cognition effort

We often form concepts by developing prototypes

• A mental image or best example of a category

When we categorize people we mentally shift them toward our category prototypes

Are our boundaries may or as we move away from our prototypes and categories

• Ex. because a whale fails to match our mammal prototype we are slower to recognize it as a mammal

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).

Problem Solving: Strategies and Obstacles

LOQ: What cognitive strategies assist our problem solving and what obstacles hinder it?

Some problems we saw through trial and error

• Ex. Thomas Edison tried thousands of light bulbs filaments before stumbling upon one that worked

We use algorithms for some problems

• Nature resorts to heuristics-simpler thinking strategies

Sometimes after thinking over a problem, all of the pieces fall into place all of a sudden

• This is called insight

  • Brain scans (EEGs or fMRIs) show bursts of activity associated with sudden flashes of insight

  • Strikes suddenly

Some cognitive tendencies may lead us astray

• Confirmation bias for example, leads us to seek evidence for our ideas more eagerly than we seek evidence against them

This obstacle to problem-solving is called fixation, an inability to come to a fresh perspective

• One example of this is mental set

  • This is our tendency to approach a problem with the mindset of what has worked for us previously

  • a perceptual set predisposes what we perceive, a mental set predisposes how we think

Algorithm: a methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem. Contrasts with the usually speedier—but also more error prone—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 an algorithm.

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

Fixation: in thinking, the inability to see a problem from a new perspective; an obstacle to problem-solving.

Mental Set: a tendency to approach a problem in one particular way, often a way that has been successful in the past

Forming Good (and Bad) Decisions and Judgments

LOQ: What is intuition, and how can the availability and representativeness heuristics influence our decisions and judgments?

We follow our intuition, our fast, automatic, unreasoned feelings, and thoughts

Intuition: an effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or thought, as contrasted with explicit, conscious reasoning.

Two Quick But Risky Shortcuts

When we need to make snap judgments, heuristics enable quick thinking without conscious awareness, and they usually serve us well

• Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman showed that the research on the representativeness and availability heuristics can lead even the smartest people into dumb decisions

The Representative Heuristic

When we judge the likelihood of something by intuitively comparing it to particular prototypes is to use the representativeness heuristic

Representativeness Heuristic: estimating the likelihood of events in terms of how well they seem to represent, or match, particular prototypes; may lead us to ignore other relevant information

The Availability Heuristic

This operates when we estimate how common an event is based on its mental availability.

• Anything that makes information pop into mind can make it seem commonplace

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

LOQ: How are our decisions and judgments affected by overconfidence, belief perseverance, and framing?

Our decisions and judmengts can go crazy because we are more confident than correct

• This tendency to overestimate the accuracy of our knowledge and judgments is overconfidence

• People who are wrong are very vulnerable to overconfidence

Overconfidence can feed extreme political views

• The ability to predict future events are typically overconfident

  • Those whose predictions most often failed tended to be inflexible and closed-minded

overconfidence sometimes has adaptive value

• Believing that the decision is right, they have time to spare, and self-confident people tend to live more happily

• They make tougher decisions more easily

Overconfidence: the tendency to be more confident than correct—to overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgments.

Belief Perseverance

Belief preference is our tendency to cling to our beliefs in the face of contrary evidence

• Instead of using evidence to draw conclusions, they used their conclusions to assess evidence

  • This is a phenomenon also known as motivated reasoning

Belief Perseverance: clinging to one’s initial conceptions after the basis on

which they were formed has bee

The Effects of Framing

Framing is the way we present an issue and it —can be a powerful tool of persuasion

• Choosing to live or die: Imagine two surgeons explaining the risk of an upcoming surgery. One explains that during this type of surgery, 10 percent of people die

• Becoming an organ donor: In many European countries, as well as in the United States, people renewing their driver’s licenses can decide whether to be organ donors. In some countries, the default option is Yes, but people can opt-out. Nearly 100 percent of the people in opt-out countries have agreed to be donors. In countries where the default option is No, most do not agree to be donors

• Opting to save for retirement: U.S. companies once required employees who wanted to contribute to a retirement plan to choose a lower take-home pay, which few people did

Framing: the way an issue is posed; how an issue is framed can significantly

affect decisions and judgments.

The Perils and Powers of Intuition

LOQ: How do smart thinkers use intuition?

Cognitive scientists are revealing intuition’s powers:

• Intuition is analysis “frozen into habit”: It is implicit (unconscious) knowledge—what we’ve recorded in our brains but can’t fully explain

• Intuition is usually adaptive, enabling quick reactions: Our fast and frugal heuristics let us intuitively assume that fuzzy-looking objects are far away —which they usually are, except on foggy mornings. Our learned associations surface as gut feelings, right or wrong

• Intuition is huge: Unconscious, automatic influences are constantly affecting our judgments

Thinking Creatively

LOQ: What is creativity, and what fosters it?

brain activity associated with intelligence differs from that associated with creativity

• Aptitude tests (such as the SAT) typically require convergent thinking—an ability to provide a single correct answer.

• Creative test (ex. How many uses can you think of for a brick?) require divergent thinking—the ability to consider many different options and to think in novel ways

  • If certain areas of the frontal lobes are injured, they can leave reading, writing, and arithmetic skills intact but destroy imagination

Robert Sternberg and his colleagues believe creativity has five components:

• Expertise: well-developed knowledge—furnishes the ideas, images, and phrases we use as mental building blocks

• Imaginative thinking skills: provide the ability to see things in novel ways, to recognize patterns, and to make connections. Having mastered a problem’s basic elements, we can redefine or explore it in a new way.

• A venturesome personality: seeks new experiences, tolerates ambiguity and risk, and perseveres in overcoming obstacles.

• Intrinsic motivation: is the quality of being driven more by interest, satisfaction, and challenge than by external pressures (Amabile & Hennessey

• A creative environment: sparks, supports, and refines creative ideas

Ways to increase your creative process:

• Develop your expertise. Ask yourself what you care about and most enjoy. Follow your passion by broadening your knowledge base and becoming an expert at something.

• Allow time for incubation. Think hard on a problem, but then set it aside and come back to it later

• Set aside time for the mind to roam freely. Creativity springs from “defocused attention”. Serenity needs spontaneity

• Experience other cultures and ways of thinking. Living abroad sets the creative juices flowing

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

Do Other Species Share Our Cognitive Skills?

LOQ: What do we know about thinking in other species?

Other animals are surprisingly smart

• Margaret Floy Washburn argued that animal consciousness and intelligence can be inferred from their behavior in her book The Animal Mind

Using Concepts and Number

By touching screens in quest of a food reward, black bears have learned to sort pictures into animal and nonanimal categories, or concepts

• Ex great apes—a group that includes chimpanzees and gorillas—also form concepts, such as cat and dog

  • After monkeys learn these concepts, certain frontal lobe neurons in their brain fire in response to new “cat-like” images, others to new “dog-like” image

Displaying Insight

Wolfgang Köhler showed that humans are not the only creatures to display insight

• placed a piece of fruit and a long stick outside the cage of a chimpanzee named Sultan, beyond his reach.

  • Köhler placed a short stick inside the cage, which Sultan grabbed, using it to try to reach the fruit

  • After several failed attempts the chimpanzee dropped the stick and seemed to survey the situation

    • They suddenly had an “aha” moment and jumped up and seized the short stick again and used it to get the long stick to then reach the fruit

Transmitting Culture

Other species invent behaviors and transmit cultural patterns to their observing peers and offspring

• Ex transmitted behaviors between chimpanzees, along with differing communication and hunting styles, are the chimpanzee version of cultural diversity.

Other Cognitive Skills

Similar to humans, chimpanzees will purposefully kill their neighbor to gain land, and they grieve over dead relatives

• They also show altruism, cooperation, and group aggression

Language and Thought

Language is our spoken, written, or signed words, and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning.

• Many animals know little more than what they sense

• Because of language, we comprehend much that we’ve never seen and that our distant ancestors never knew.

language: our spoken, written or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning.

Language Structure

LOQ: What are the structural components of a language?

We need 3 building blocks to create a spoken language

• Phonemes are the smallest distinctive sound units in a language. As a general rule, consonant phonemes carry more information than do vowel phonemes.

• Morphemes are the smallest language units that carry meaning. There are a few words in English that are morphemes are also phonemes

• Grammar is a language’s set of rules that enable people to communicate. Grammatical rules guide us in deriving meaning from sounds (semantics) and in ordering words into sentences (syntax)

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. Semantics is the language’s set of rules for deriving meaning from sounds, and syntax is its set of rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences.

Language Acquisition and Development

Language is the jewel in the crown of cognition to Steven Pinker

• If you didn’t have sight or hearing, you could still have friends and a job. But without language, it would be hard for you have these things

Language Acquisition: How Do We Learn Language?

LOQ: How do we acquire language, and what is universal grammar?

Noam Chomsky has argued that language is an unlearned human trait, separate from other parts of human cognition

• theorized that a builtin predisposition to learn grammar rules, which he called universal grammar

  • This helps explain why preschoolers pick up language so readily and use grammar so well

Other researchers note that children actually learn grammar as they discern patterns in the language they hear

• Chomsky agrees that we are not born with a built-in specific language or a specific set of grammatical rules

• no matter what language we learn, we start speaking it mostly in nouns rather than verbs and adjectives

Language Development: When Do We Learn Language?

LOQ: What are the milestones in language development, and when is the critical period for acquiring language?

As children we are able to create our own original sentences and applying these rules of syntax

• As a preschooler, you comprehended and spoke with a facility better than college students trying to learn the same language

Receptive Language

Children’s language development moves from simplicity to complexity

• Infants start without language

  • infant’s language comprehension greatly outpaces their language production

• By 4 months old, babies s can recognize differences in speech sounds as reading lips

• At 6 months before speaking many infants recognize object names

• 7 months and up they grow in their power to segment spoken sounds into individual words

• By about 10 months old, infants’ babbling has changed so that a trained ear can identify the household language

• Close to their first birthday, most children enter the one-word stage

  • They begin to use sounds—usually only one barely recognizable syllable, such as ma or da—to communicate meaning.

    • Family members learn to understand the infant’s language and the baby eventually conforms more to the language in their home

• At 18 months children’s word learning explodes from about a word per week to a word per day

• By 2 years old, many have entered the two-word stage

  • start uttering two-word sentences in telegraphic speech

Productive Language

Before receptive language, babies’ productive language—their ability to produce words— matures

• Before nature molds their speech, it enables a variety of possible sounds in the babbling stage

  • This happens around 4 months

  • Babbling do not imitate adults- it’s a wide variety of sounds from different languages

Babbling Stage: beginning around 4 months, the stage of speech development in which an 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 development during 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.

Critical Periods

For some children such as ones who have a cochlear implant to enable hearing, or those who are adopted by a family in another country get a late start on learning a particular language

• For these children, language learning follows the same sequence but usually at a faster rate

The older people are when moving to a new country, the harder it is to ANSWER: learn its language and to absorb its culture

• “Children can learn multiple languages without an accent and with good grammar, if they are exposed to the language before puberty. But after puberty, it’s very difficult to learn a second language so well. Similarly, when I first went to Japan, I was told not even to bother trying to bow, that there were something like a dozen different bows and I was always going to ‘bow with an accent” - Stephen Kosslyn

Deafness and Language Development

Children who are born deaf to parents of hearing, they typically do not experience language during their early years.

• If they learn to sign after age 9, it is not as good as children who learned it before age 9

Living in a Silent World

Helen Keller said “blindness cuts people off from things. Deafness cuts people off from people.”

• In several studies, people with hearing loss, especially those not wearing hearing aids, have reported feeling sadder, being less socially engaged, and more often experiencing others’ irritation

The Brain and Language

LOQ: What brain areas are involved in language processing and speech?

Damage to any of several cortical areas can produce aphasia, impairment of language

• some people with aphasia can speak fluently but cannot read (despite good vision)

• Others can comprehend what they read but cannot speak.

  • some can write but not read, read but not write, read numbers but not letters, or sing but not speak.

• This shows that language is complex and that different brain areas must serve different language functions.

Paul Broca confirmed an observation that after damage to an area of the left frontal lobe (now called Broca’s Area) a person would struggle to speak words, yet could sing familiar songs and comprehend speech

• 10 years later Carl Wernicke discovered that after damage to a specific area of the left temporal lobe (Wenicke’s Area)

  • people were unable to understand others’ words and could speak only meaningless word

Neuroscience today has confirmed brain activity in Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas during language processing

• people with aphasia, electrical stimulation of Broca’s area can help restore their speaking abilities

  • Broca’s area coordinates the brain’s processing of language in other areas as well

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: helps control language expression—an area of the frontal lobe, usually in the left hemisphere, that directs the muscle movements involved in speech.

Wernicke’s Area: a brain area involved in language comprehension and expression; usually in the left temporal lobe.

Do Other Species Have Language?

LOQ: What do we know about other species’ capacity for language?

Some animals display basic language processing

• Ex. Pigeons can learn the difference between words and nonwords, but they could never read a book

• Other animals show impressive comprehension and communication.

  • Some monkey species sound different alarm cries for different predators, such as a barking call for a leopard, a cough for an eagle, and a chuttering for a snake

Allen Gardner and Beatrix Gardner took intrest with work with Washoe, a young chimpanzee

• While building on chimpanzees’ natural tendencies for gestured communication, they taught Washoe sign language

  • After 4 years she could do 132 signs and 2005 by the end of her life

There were several skeptics of being bale to teach chimps language

• Ape vocabularies and sentences are simple, rather like those of a 2-yearold child. And apes gain their limited vocabularies only with great difficulty. Speaking or signing children can easily soak up dozens of new words each week, and 60,000 by adulthood.

• Chimpanzees can make signs or push buttons in sequence to get a reward. But pigeons, too, can peck a sequence of keys to get grain. The apes’ signing might be nothing more than aping their trainers’ signs and learning that certain arm movements produce rewards.

• When information is unclear, we are prone to perceptual set—a tendency to see what we want or expect to see. Interpreting chimpanzee signs as language may have been little more than the trainers’ wishful thinking

• “Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange . . .” is a far cry from the exquisite syntax of a 3-year-old

  • Rules of syntax in human language govern the order of words in sentences, so to a child, “You tickle” and “Tickle you” communicate different ideas

  • A chimpanzee, lacking these rules of syntax, might use the same sequence of signs for both phrases.

Thinking and Language

LOQ: What is the relationship between thinking and language, and what is the value of thinking in images?

Benjamin Lee Whorf believed that “language itself shapes a [person’s] basic ideas.”

• Said that since the Hopi, who have no past tense for their verbs, could not readily think about the past

  • His linguistic determinism hypothesis was too extreme

    • A weaker verion of this is ligustic relativism- rightly emphasizes that our words influence our thinking

Our words do influence our thinking

• They define our mental categories

• Ex. Many bilingual individuals report that they have different senses of self—that they feel like different people—depending on which language they are using

Young children’s thinking develops hand in hand with their language

• Increased word power helps explain what McGill University researcher Wallace Lambert has called the bilingual advantage

• Bilingual children also exhibit enhanced social skills, by being better able to shift to understand another’s perspective

Thinking in Images

Words do convey ideas, but it sometimes ideas precede words

• You might not think something in words but with implicit memory, you can picture how you do it

• We think in images very offer

  • Ex. artists, composers, poets, mathematicians, athletes, and scientists all think in images

Mental rehearsal can also help you achieve an academic goal

• It’s better to spend your fantasy time planning how to reach your goal than to focus on your desired destination.

Linguistic Determinism: Whorf’s hypothesis that language determines the way we think.