PSYC 102: Chapter 8 Textbook

Cognition

All of the mental activities associated with thinking, including:

• knowing

• remembering

• solving problems

• making judgements and decisions

• communicating

Cognitive Psychology

The scientific study of mental activities associated with thinking and how they work

Mental Representations

• Internal mental symbols that stand for some object, event or state of affairs in the world

• allow people to think about things even when those things are absent

• humans have mental representations for things that exist only in their imaginations (eg. unicorns)

Concept

• mental categories that group similar objects, events, ideas or people

• rather than come up with separate mental representations for everything, the mind organizes them into concepts

• allow us to use prior experiences to understand and react to new things that we encounter

• in order to be useful, concepts need to have boundaries that help you determine whether something does or does not fit within the concept

  • concepts are formed by family resemblance structure

• the mind organizes concepts into hierarchies

Family Resemblance

• The idea that members of a category can share overlapping similarities, without necessarily having a single common feature

• a concept can have a set of features that each member has some subset of, even though different members have different subsets of features

Prototype

• A best example or average member of a concept that incorporates more of the features most commonly associated with it

• the closer something is to the prototype of a concept, the more quickly people can identify it with that concept

Basic-Level Concept

• broad enough to include a lot of members, yet their members still have a lot of features in common (similar parts, movements, functions and shapes)

• share family resemblance

• have clearly defined prototypes and the level where one would find the prototype of the concept

• ways of representing information, giving us a lot of useful information for relatively little effort

• people tend to identify members of basic-level concepts quicker than superordinate or subordinate concepts, suggesting that it is a fundamental cognitive process

Superordinate Concepts

• most abstract

• encompasses multiple basic level concepts

Subordinate Concepts

• specific concepts within basic-level concepts

• most specific

• members have fewer features in common and a looser family resemblance

Well-Defined Problems

• Questions that have a clear goal and a clear set of available options for reaching that goal

• adding constraints and assumptions narrows the scope of options and defines a problem more clearly, but has the potential downside of hiding some of the best solutions from view

• people need to define problems well enough in order to attempt solving it

Ill-Defined Problems

Problems with hazy goals and indistinct paths for reaching them (many possible solutions)

Ways of Solving Problems: Trial and Error

Trying actions or strategies at random until they find something that works

Ways of Solving Problems: Algorithms

A step by step procedure that guarantees a solution

Insight

• A sudden conscious change in a person’s understanding of some situation or problem

• although the experience can feel spontaneous, insight involves unconscious cognitive work

• insight sometimes arises when we pick up on useful information from our environment without being consciously aware of it

• being in a good mood makes insight more likely

Subliminal

Stimuli that are presented below a person's threshold for conscious perception, meaning they are not consciously recognized or understood, but can still influence mental processes and behavior

Why would a positive mood affect insight?

It may be that positive emotions broaden one’s scope of attention, making it easier to pick up on useful information from one’s environment and to see connections among unrelated things

Insight in the Brain

• before solving a problem analytically (consciously), ppl showed more activity in the visual cortex

• before solving a problem with insight, ppl show more activity in the temporal lobes, believed to reflect the brain’s preparation for using understanding of words to solve the problem

• ppl also showed more activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, reflecting a focus of attention inward rather than outward

  • heightened attention inward may allow a person to detect less obvious solutions the brain generates and bring those to conscious awareness

• these findings suggest that people experience insight when prompted by clues not only from their environment but also their own minds

Drawing on Past Experience

• one important factor that determines whether we succeed in solving a problem is whether we can draw on prior knowledge and experience

• for a complex problem, using prior experience may involve drawing an analogy to a previous, similar problem

• occasionally, knowledge and experience make it harder to solve a problem (lead to functional fixedness)

Analogy

A comparison or similarity between two things that allows one thing to be used to understand or explain another

Mental Set

A mental framework for how to solve a problem based on prior experience with similar problems

• usually an efficient way of solving a problem, but can sometimes prevent us from seeing better or simpler solutions

Functional Fixedness

A tendency to focus on an object’s typical functions and thus fail to recognize unusual functions that could solve a problem

Restructuring

• the process of reorganizing one’s understanding of a problem to facilitate a solution

• When prior experience gets in the way, the best bet may be to change one’s understanding of the problem

Judgements

Conclusions drawn from evidence we have at hand

• judgements often lead to decisions

Decisions

Choices that affect our behavior

Rational Decision

A decision that is based purely on reason and logic

• this is an intimidating task, and having too many choices can lead people to make no decision at all

Bounded Rationality

• The idea that rational decision making is constrained by limitations in people’s cognitive abilities (attention, memory, processing), available information and time

• these limited resources not only influence our willingness to make a decision, they also constrain how logical and reasonable our decisions can be

• sometimes people turn to others and to technology to work around their limitations

Dual-Processing Theories

People have two types of thinking that they can use to make judgements and decisions

• controlled system: slower and more effortful and leads to more thoughtful and rational outcomes

  • people engage this mode for decisions that really matter and don’t involve time pressure

• automatic system: fast and fairly effortless and leads to decent outcomes most of the time

  • ppl fall back on this mode when they are tired, overwhelmed by information or want to make a fast decision

Heuristics

• A mental shortcut that allows people to efficiently solve problems and make judgments and decisions

• quick, effortless, intuitive and automatic

• tend to operate outside conscious awareness, therefore people are unusually unaware that they are using them, believing instead that they are reasoning through things carefully and logically

• usually lead to good judgments and decisions, at least ones better than chance, but have the possibility to lead people to make illogical decisions

Representativeness Heuristic

• Shortcut for judging the likelihood of things in terms of how well they seem to represent of be prototypical of some category

• any understanding of statistics or logic is overridden by your knowledge about concepts and what prototypical members of those concepts are like

• usually leads to efficient judgements and decisions

Availability Heuristic

Strategy for deciding how common or probable something is based on how easily it comes to mind

• often times, the difference in availability reflects a difference in how common they are

• sometimes examples are more available in our mind because we’ve encountered them more recently, because they were distinctive or vivid or the news media reported these events in a biased way

• when the availability heuristic leads us astray, it can spark irrational fears

Affect Heuristic

• A mental shortcut for making judgements and decisions that involve relying on affect (positive or negative)

• Zajonc proposed: when people first encounter a decision, their first reaction is an affective one

  • these initial affective reactions are so quick and automatic that they guide people’s decisions more often than reason

• basic feeling of “good for me” (positive affect) or “bad for me” (negative affect)

• ppl apply affective heuristic even when thinking about events that haven’t happened yet and can only imagine

• Damasio proposed that affective reactions are essential

• potential downside: our affect can be manipulated, also impacting our judgements and decisions

Consequence of being unable to use affect to guide decisions

Making choices that are not in one’s best interest

Moral Judgement

Judgements about the “rightness” or “wrongness” of a particular behavior

Belief Perseverance

• The tendency for people to resist changing their beliefs, even when faced with disconfirming evidence

• seeing both sides of the issue can strengthen what people initially believed instead of making them more open to the opposite perspective

• ppl cling to their beliefs even when they learn that the basis of their beliefs is blatantly false (will claim that the truth was made up)

• once we think we know something, it can be difficult to un-know it

Problems of Confirmation Bias: Criminal Justice

• can affect how police, judges, eyewitnesses, prosecutors, etc. approach a case

• the belief that a particular suspect is guilty can lead investigators to seek and favor evidence of that guilt and avoid evidence innocence

Problems of Confirmation Bias: Scientific Research

• favor research findings that confirm their hypotheses and discount that don’t (see those as flukes)

• it is easier to publish findings that show confirmatory evidence or statistically significant differences

Problems of Confirmation Bias: Social Media

• can modify algorithm to filter what you see and read, thus confirming attitudes and worldview

• sometimes information looks credible but is false or misleading

Reducing Confirmation Bias/ Belief Perseverance

• encouraging ppl to actively imagine and consider the opposite point of view (need to do more than simply be exposed to the other pov)

• consistently consider whether our reasoning is wrong or flawed

Uncertainty in Humans

When people are uncertain, their thinking can be too flexible and easily swayed by seemingly irrelevant information

Framing

• The way an issue, decision or set of options is described/presented

• framing can change decisions by shifting the decision maker’s reference point

• people are more likely to choose options that are considered the default over any alternatives

• the current state provides the reference point for making decisions, changes from this reference point come with uncertainty and potential costs

Loss Aversion

• Tendency to make choices, including riskier ones, to minimize losses

• leads people to cling tightly to what they have, for fear of losing it (reject the gamble that may lead to loss)

• compared with the worst possible outcome, anything seems like a gain and compared with the best possible outcome, anything seems like a loss

Is it problematic that people’s reference points are easily shifted?

• Some psychologists have argued that shifting reference frames is an important way that people make smart decisions when they lack experience or knowledge

• in these situations, people make decisions by grasping at whatever information or clues are available

• the way questions are worded or framed, can provide critical clues to the listener about which option the the question asker recommends as the best decision to make

• references points can similarly communicate what other people have chosen and recommend. Framing effects may reveal that people are sensitive to what others think and communicate

Hindsight Bias

The tendency, once some outcome is known, to overestimate the likelihood that one would have predicted that outcome in advance

eg. When asked to provide a second opinion, we might feel biased to confirm the first opinion

Reducing Hindsight Bias

Provide specific reasons to why each of the possible options might be correct

What causes overconfidence bias?

• Usually, people can’t truly know whether their answers are correct, so in judging their confidence, they have to rely on imperfect information, such as how easily the answer came to mind

• makes them more sucessful: may improve a person’s mental health, increase motivation and even give them a social advantage

• overconfidence may also give people a romantic edge or perceived as more intimidating

Language

• humans use language to make collaborative thinking possible

• shared system of symbols (including spoken, written and signed words and gestures), and a set of rules for how to combine those symbols to communcate meaning

• humans can change another human’s thinking through language

• people transfer knowledge from one mind to another and transmit civilization’s accumulated knowledge across generations

• language can be flexibly arranged to convey different meanings

Phonemes

Smallest unit of language, such as the individuals sounds that make up speech

Morphemes

• The smallest units of language that carry bits of meaning

• many morphemes are words (eg. talk)

• other morphemes are parts of words, like prefixes and suffixes, that change the tense or plurality or words

• phonemes are organized into morphemes

Grammar

• governs the way that language parts are put together so that people can understand each other

• each language has grammar

• there are grammatical rules at every level of language: phonemes, morphemes, phrases, etc.

• most of our grammatical knowledge was learned implicitly, by listening to others speak and practicing speaking ourselves

• grammatical rules can change over time as communities develop new ideas and ways to communicate

Syntax

Grammatical rules that govern how words and phrases combine into well-formed sentences

Pragmatics

Rules that govern the practical aspects of using language. such as taking turns, using intonation and gestures and talking to different types of people

Linguistic Determinism Hypothesis (Whorfian Hypothesis)

Different languages impose different ways of understanding the world that can constrain and shape our thinking

• language and thought are one and the same

Eg. blue vs dark blue

• having the same word for two colors makes people see them as more similar and makes them slower to recognize them as different

• having two different words for those colors makes people see them as more different and makes them faster to recognize them as such

Verbal Interference

Situations where the use of language interferes with other cognitive processes, especially nonverbal ones

Modern Findings in comparison to Whorf

Language may not define thinking entirely, but it does guide thinking in ways that suit the cultures we live in

Operant Conditioning

Learning mechanism that involves learning that one’s actions lead to specific outcomes

Babbling

• the production of speech sounds by infants at 6-7 months

• the ability the understand phonemes develops earlier than the ability to produce them

• only a few months after infants show evidence of identifying speech sounds, they spontaneously start practicing them

• babbling often takes form of consonant-vowel combinations repeated over and over

Infants of 10 months - 1 year

• infants start out as universal listeners and producers of speech sounds

• by the time babies reach their first birthday, they can only hear speech differences in their own language

• by 10 months, babbling starts to sound more like the household language

• before their first birthday, infants can determine where words in speech begin and end. They keep track of which syllables tend to co-occur with which other syllables, helping them extract words from a continuous flow of speech

• by 9-10 months, infants develop expectations for how long words are likely to be

When children hear a new word

They are surrounded by hundreds of potential meanings for that word, objects, properties of objects (shape or color), actions, properties of actions (speed or pattern) and specific people and animals

How do they figure out the new word?

• infants are sensitive to what other people are paying attention to when they speak

• people look at the things they are labeling, so infants can track an adult’s eye gaze to narrow the possibilities of the new word

Children 1 ½ - 2 years

• mastered words and can start putting together two-word utterances

• during this phase of language development, words are sparse, mostly nouns and verbs with no adverbs or adjectives, but they tend to go in a sensible order according to the grammatical rules of a given language

Children 3 years

• children’s speech progresses very rapidly

• children can say short sentences that include not only nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, but function words such as of and the

• use their emerging understanding of grammar to learn more words

Children age 5

• children speak like adults

• it is clear they are mastering the grammatical rules of their language

• make overregularization errors, demonstrating their expertise in grammar

Overregularization Errors

A language error by children that involves extending rules of word formation. These errors reveal children’s understanding of grammar

• add an ed, to irregular verbs that don’t follow the rules to mark the past tense

Language by Natural Selection (Larynx)

• the ability to produce speech in human language is shaped by natural selection

• vocal sounds in humans and other animals are made possible by the larynx

• the larynx sits lower in the throat, and combined with a shorter and deeper tongue, humans can make a large range of vocal sounds

• downside: we can’t eat and breathe at the same time

  • higher chance of choking to death

  • the larynx in newborns is higher in the throat, so they can eat and breathe at the same time

Language Acquisition Device

• innate mechanism that explains language acquisition in children

• gets turned on when children are exposed to language

• guides language learning automatically, with no direct teaching necessary

• proposed by Chomsky

Universal Grammar

• Humans are born with an innate, universal framework for language, which provides a foundation for language acquisition

• shapes how children learn specific languages, even though languages vary significantly

• human languages have common features such as nouns, verbs, subjects and objects

• children are prepared to learn the specific features of their native language rapidly

Sensitive Period

• there is a limited window for learning language

• language is learned more readily when people are young

• children can also learn second languages more easily than adults do

  • even tho they take longer to get started than adults, they will learn the language deeper

Explanations for Sensitive Period

• humans have a specialize ability for language acquisition

• children learn language better because they are more cognitively limited than adults

  • children have no choice but to learn languge by first mastering phonemes and morphemes and then the more complex components

  • they learn language from the ground up (best way to do so)

Intelligence

The capability to think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, reason, plan, solve problems, learn from experience and acquire new knowledge

Hypotheses for Intelligence

1. intelligence is a singular capability, and a person with this can consistently do well across all mental processes

2. there’s no such thing as intelligence in general. Instead, each person has a collection of specialized capacities

3. performance on tests involves a combination of overlapping general abilities and more specialized abilities.

General Intelligence (g factor)

• proposed by Spearman

• a general mental ability is required for any mental test

• according to Spearman, people with high g have an advantage over those with less g, on all mental tasks

g Factor: Fluid Intelligence (g(F))

• A component of general intelligence that involves the ability to deal with new and unusual problems

• we use it to deliberately think our way through challenging problems or decisions

g Factor: Crystallized Intelligence (g(C))

• component of general intelligence that involves accumulated knowledge and skills

• includes knowledge of language, repertoire of skills and strategies for dealing with familiar problems and other facts

Sternberg’s Intelligence

• evidence for g factor comes from Western studies and culture, where formal schooling and academic abilities are highly valued

• Western tests of intelligence are too narrow to capture the meaning of intelligence around the world

• Sternberg proposed 3 kinds of intelligence that contribute to a person’s success

• comprehensive intelligence measures that include his 3 kinds of intelligence can predict college performance better than SAT scores or high school GPAs

Sternberg’s Intelligence: Analytical Intelligence

• “book smarts”

• ability to break down problems into component parts for problem solving

• eg. intelligence tests that measure school grades

Sternberg’s Intelligence: Creative Intelligence

• ability to deal with new problems and generate innovative ideas and solutions

• eg. thinking up a caption for an untitled photograph or cartoon

Sternberg’s Intelligence: Practical Intelligence

• “street smarts”

• the ability to reason skillfully in day-to-day life

• eg. asking people to figure out ow to move furniture up a winding staircase

Gardner’s Intelligences: Verbal-Linguistic

• ability to perceive and use language, including the sounds, rhythms, and meanings of words and different functions of language

• eg. poet, journalist

Gardner’s Intelligences: Logical-Mathematical

• Ability to perceive logical or numerical patterns and to reason about long, complex problems

• eg. scientist, mathematician

Gardner’s Intelligences: Visual-spatial

• ability to perceive the visual-spatial world accurately, and to represent the spatial world accurately in your mind

• eg. navigator, sculptor

Gardner’s Intelligences: Bodily Kinesthetic

• ability to use one’s whole body or parts of the body to solve problems, make things, or communicate through a performance

• eg. dancer, athlete

Gardner’s Intelligences: Musical

• ability to perceive and produce music, including rhythm, pitch and timbre

• eg. composer, violinist

Gardner’s Intelligences: Naturalistic

• ability to discriminate among natural things and sensitivity to features and patterns in the natural world

• eg. biologist, chef

Gardner’s Intelligences: Interpersonal

• ability to understand other people, such as recognizing and responding appropriately to their mood, temperaments, motivations and desires

• eg. therapist, salesperson

Gardner’s Intelligences: Intrapersonal

• ability to understand one’s self, including accessing and recognizing one’s feelings, drawing on one’s feelings to guide behavior, and knowing of one’s own strengths, weaknesses, desires and intelligences

Savant Syndrome

The presence of unusual talents in people who are otherwise profoundly mentally disabled

Binet and Simon

• designed tests that included a broad range of tasks varying in content and difficulty to measure intelligence in children

• they compared scores to figure out who was advanced and who was falling behind

• they assumed that children all follow a similar path of intellectual development, with some developing more rapidly than others

• they used a child’s test scores to compute the child’s mental age

Mental Age

• a number that represents the average age at which children perform closest to, given child’s score on an intelligence test

• by comparing the mental age to the child’s chronological age, Binet and Simon felt they had an objective measure of whether the child was typical, delayed or advanced in intellectual development

Intelligence Quotient (IQ score)

• a measure of intelligence that is calculated by dividing a child’s mental age by the chronological age and then multiplying by 100

• if a child’s mental age matches their chronological age = 100

Eugenics

• gradually improve society by encouraging only the smartest to have children

Biases in Standford-Binet tests

• it was administered widely to new immigrants in U.S and was used to argue for innate differences in intelligence between people of different racial and cultural backgrounds

• used to justify forced medical sterilizations of people considered intellectually deficient

• Stanford-Binet tests were biased against children from low-income or racial/ethnic-minority backgrounds and contributed to children from these groups being denied educational opportunities

Achievement Tests

• test designed to measure how much a person has learned over a certain period of time

• also used to determine whether someone is likely to succeed in a particular school, program or job

Aptitude Tests

• test designed to measure a person’s potential to learn new skills

Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS)

• most widely used test to assess how well people are functioning and whether they have cognitive problems

• lengthy tests composed of subtests that assess general knowledge, vocabulary, comprehension, etc.

• scores can capture overall ability or used to identify relative strengths and weaknesses

Criteria for useful intelligence tests: Standardization

• process of making test scores more meaningful by defining them in relation to the performance of a pretested group

• scores tend to be distributed in a bell-shaped curve or the normal curve

Percentile Rank

• tells you how many people scored lower than you did

• this info is made possible by the standardization of the tests

Criteria for useful intelligence tests: Reliability

• extent to which a test produces consistent results

• test-retest reliability: give the same test to the same people

• split-half reliability: split the test in half and see whether performance on one half correlates strongly with the other half

Criteria for useful intelligence tests: Validity

• extent to which a test samples whatever behavior is of interest

• predictive validity: whether they can predict how well a person will do in setting that require intelligence

  • measured by examining the correlation between the test score and some criterion measured at a later time

Test Anxiety: Emotionality

• feeling of anxiety itself (pounding heart, dry mouth, sweaty palms)

• this doesn’t typically hurt performance

• the physical symptoms of anxiety reflect the body’s attempt to mobilize action and help a person perform well

• the body increases available physical resources for the muscles and brain and reduces resources for nonessential tasks like eating and digesting (hence dry mouth and upset stomach)

Test Anxiety: Worry

• in the heat of their anxiety, people start to worry that they will fail and what the consequences of that failure might be

• that worry eats up mental resources that the person needs in order to perform

• one way to reduce worry is to change the way people are interpreting their anxiety

Stereotype Threat

• a concern that one’s behavior or performance might confirm a negative stereotype about one’s group

• members of groups that are negatively stereotyped face worries about their ability to perform well intellectually more regularly

• increases the feelings of doubt and worry and decreases the ability to concentrate during a test

• even reminders of negative stereotypes can impair performance for those who feel targeted