Thinking

Language & Thought

Cognition

• Mental activities of thinking, knowing, remembering, & communicating information.

Concepts

• Mental groupings of similar:

• Objects

• Evetns

• Ideas

• People

prototypes

• A mental image (best example) of a category.

Initial thinking about a new stimulus often changes after it is integrated into our conceptual worldview.

Our first perceptions typically become more embedded as time passes.

Asian face is remembered as “more Asian” after time (Corneille, et al., 2004).

Problem Solving

Algorithm

• Logical, methodical rule for solving a problem.

Heuristic

• Simple thinking strategy that quickly solves a problem.

“rule of thumb”

Insight

• Sudden realization of a solution to a problem -without a strategy.

Once we form a belief, we tend to use all information to support that belief.

Confirmation Bias

• The tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions.

• The tendency to avoid evidence that is contradictory to our preconceptions.

Fixation

• The inability to see a problem in a different way.

Mental Set

• The tendency to approach a problem in a certain way -”set” in one’s bias.

• Predisposes how we think.

• (Perceptual Set- predisposition to what we see.)

Making Judgments

Intuition

• A “gut feeling”

• Fast

• Automatic

• Emotionally based

• Not reflective or logic based

Availability Heuristic

• Estimating the likelihood of something based on our memory of previous occurrences (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974).

• Casino bells & lights give us the sense that a lot of winning is going on.

Overconfidence

• The tendency to be more confident than correct.

Belief Perseverance

• Clinging to one’s initial bias, despite contradictory evidence.

Framing

• The way an issue is presented influences our interpretation of it.

Framing

• 10% of patients die in this operation.• 90% of patients live through this

operation (Marteau, 1989).

• Condoms have 95% success rate in stopping HIV.

• Condoms have a 5% fail-rate (Linville et al., 1992).

Nonhuman Animal Cognition

Nonhuman Cognition

• Pigeons can sort objects into categories (Wasserman, 1995).

• Great apes can categorize images (Freedman, 2001).

• Wolfgang Köhler (1925) chimpanzee “Sultan” insight problem solving.

• Chimpanzee tool use (& imitating tool use).• Altruism• Voice recognition

Language & Thought(psycholinguistics)

Language

• Spoken, written, or signed communication.

3 building blocks of spoken language

1. Phonemes

2. Morphemes

3. grammar

Phoneme

• Smallest sound unit.

• B, t, k/c

• 40 in english

Morpheme

• Smallest sound unit that carries meaning.

• I

• A

• “Pre….” “…ed”

• 100,000 in English

Grammar

• System rules that structure meaning.

Semantics

• meaning

Language Development

• Babbling (4 months)

• One-Word Stage (1-2 years)

• Two-Word Stage (2 years)

Language Development

• 1-18 years we learn about 60,000 words.

• After age 2, we learn about 3,500 words a year (Bloom, 2000).

Receptive Language

• By 4 months babies recognize differences in speech sounds.

• By 4 months can read lips.• Prefer to look at the face that is making

the motion & sound.• 7 months can distinguish sound

segments into separate words (Newman, 2006).

Productive Language

• Follows receptive language in development.• Can recognize incorrect noun/verb placement

before being able to speak it (Bernal, 2010).• Deaf infants babble with their hands.• By 10 months, babbling becomes words.• Without exposure to other languages, babies

lose their ability to hear certain sounds (l & r in Japanese & English natives).

Language

• 7,000 different languages.

• Noam Chomsky

• Universal Grammar

• LAD: Language Acquisition Device

Telegraphic Speech

• Nouns & verbs

• “go, car”

Critical Period

Sensitive period

Age when development in most effective.

Accent before age 3.By age 7 children lose their sensitivity to learn

language as a mother tongue.

Brain & Language

Aphasia

• Impairment of language

Broca’s Area (1865)

• Left frontal lobe

• Speech production

Wernicke’s Area (1874)

• Speech comprehension (understanding)

• Language production & comprehension is distributed across the entire brain.

• Neural networks are activated for nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc…

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O101aJ-XGPc

Nonhuman speech

• 1960s Gardner & Gardner taught “Washoe” (chimp) 245 signs.

• Chimps can develop can communicate on the level of a 2 year old human.

Jane Goodall

• http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_goodall_on_what_separates_us_from_the_apes.html

Why Dogs Smile and Chimpanzees Cry

http://youtu.be/DIV9mYHdpwU

• Part II http://youtu.be/cvtiALFufi8

Language & Thought

“We don’t do language, language does us.” -Martin Heidegger

Linguistic Determinism

• Whorfian Hypothesis (1956)