chapter 4: cognition, consciousness, and language

Language acquisition is innate and controlled by the language acquisition device (LAD)

Nativist (biological) theory

Language acquisition explained by operant conditioning and reinforcement by caregivers

Learning (behaviorist) theory

Language acquisition caused by motivation to communicate and interact with others

Social interactionist theory

Lens through which we view and interpret the world is created by language

Whorfian (linguistic relativity) hypothesis

Motor function of speech; damage causes nonfluent aphasia with effortful speech generation

Broca's area

Language comprehension; damage causes fluent, nonsensical aphasia with lack of comprehension

Wernicke's area

Connects Broca's and Wernicke's areas; damage causes inability to repeat words despite intact speech and comprehension

Arcuate fasciculus

State of consciousness with high suggestibility; used for pain control, therapy, memory enhancement, weight loss, smoking cessation

Hypnosis

Quieting of the mind; often used for anxiety relief and in religious practices

Meditation

Promote or mimic GABA activity in the brain; includes alcohol, barbiturates, benzodiazepines

Depressants

Increase dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin concentration at synaptic cleft; includes amphetamines, cocaine, ecstasy

Stimulants

Includes heroin, morphine, opium, and prescription pain medications; can cause respiratory depression

Opiates and opioids

Includes LSD, peyote, mescaline, ketamine, psilocybin-containing mushrooms

Hallucinogens

Has depressant, stimulant, and hallucinogenic effects; active ingredient is tetrahydrocannabinol

Marijuana

Drug addiction mediated by mesolimbic pathway (nucleus accumbens, medial forebrain bundle, ventral tegmental area); dopamine is main neurotransmitter

Mesolimbic pathway

Allows focus on one stimulus while determining if background stimuli require attention

Selective attention

Uses automatic processing to pay attention to multiple activities simultaneously

Divided attention

actual sound of speech

Phonology

Building blocks of words, such as rules for pluralization and past tense

Morphology

Meaning of words

Semantics

Rules dictating word order

Syntax

Changes in language delivery depending on context

Pragmatics

Shortcuts or rules of thumb used to make decisions

Heuristics

Occurs when decision maker cannot objectively evaluate information

Bias

“Gut feeling” regarding a decision, often based on experience

Intuition

Theory proposing at least eight areas of intelligence: linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalist

Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences

State of being awake and able to think, perceive, process, and express information; beta and alpha waves on EEG

Alertness

Light sleep dominated by theta waves

Stage 1 sleep

Slightly deeper sleep with theta waves, sleep spindles, and K complexes

Stage 2 sleep

Deep (slow-wave) sleep with delta waves; most sleep-wake disorders occur here; dreaming focuses on declarative memory

Stages 3 and 4 sleep

Mind appears awake on EEG but body is asleep; eye movements and paralysis occur; dreaming focuses on procedural memory

REM sleep

Melatonin released by pineal gland in evening promotes sleepiness; cortisol rises in morning promotes wakefulness

Circadian rhythm hormones

Brain encodes, stores, and retrieves information like a computer

Information processing model

Stages of cognitive development: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, formal operational

Piaget's stages

Focuses on manipulating environment to meet needs; object permanence ends stage

Sensorimotor stage

Focuses on symbolic thinking, egocentrism, and centration

Preoperational stage

Focuses on understanding feelings of others and manipulating physical objects

Concrete operational stage

Focuses on abstract thought and problem solving

Formal operational stage

Requires identification of problem, generation and testing of solutions, and evaluation of results

Problem solving

Pattern of approach for a given problem; inappropriate patterns can hinder solving

Mental set

Tendency to use objects only in their normal way, creating barriers to problem solving

Functional fixedness

a formula or procedure for solving a certain type of problem

algorithm

starts from a set a general rules and draws conclusions from the information given

deductive (top-down) reasoning

seeks to create a theory via generalizations

inductive (bottom-up) reasoning

used when we base the likelihood of an event on how easily examples of that event come to mind

availability heuristic

involves categorizing items on the basis of whether they fit the prototypical, stereotypical, or representative image of the category

representativeness heuristic

using prototypical or stereotypical factors while ignoring actual numerical information

base rate fallacy