Chapter 9: Thinking, Language, and Intelligence - Psychology 1101

Cognition

psychologist who study __________________ focuses on the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating information

Concepts

-mental groupings of similar objects, events, ideas, and people
-simplify our thinking

Prototype

-mental image or best example of a category
-how we form our concepts

Algorithms

-step-by-step procedures that guarantee a solution
-can be laborious and exasperating

Heuristics

-simpler thinking strategies resorted to by nature
-"rule of thumb"
-EXP: seeing the combination of letters "SPLOYOCHYG" and grouping letters that often appear together ("CH" and "GY") and excluding rare letter combinations (such as two "Y's" together

Insight

-an abrupt true-seeming, and often satisfying solutions
-this strikes suddenly, with no prior sense of "getting warmer" or feeling close to a solution
-before the "aha!" moment, the frontal lobes are active, and at the instant of discovery, there was a burst of activity in the right temporal lobe, just above the ear

Confirmation Bias

-tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence
-Peter Wason said "once people form a belief - that vaccines cause (or do not cause) autism spectrum disorder - they prefer belief confirming information"

Fixation

-inability to see a problem from a fresh perspective
-can occur once we incorrectly represent a problem, it's hard for us to restructure how we approach it

Mental Set

-tendency to approach a problem with eh mind-set of what haas worked for us previously
-example of fixation
-predisposes how we think

Perceptual Set

predisposes what we perceive

Electrical Stimulation

-to suppress impediments (such as mental and perceptual sets) to our natural creativity, researches has used __________________ __________________ to decreases left hemisphere activity and increase right hemisphere activity (associated with novel thinking)
-the result was improved inside, less restrained by the assumptions created by past experiences

Intuition

-effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or though
-your "gut feeling"
-instantaneous judgements due to our mind's automatic information processing

Availability Heuristic

-operated when we estimate the likelihood of events based on how mentally available they are (how easily they come to mind)
-EXP: 9/11 terrorists attacks were dramatic events that can shape peoples impressions of the whole group by associating all people from that ethnic or religious group as terrorists

Overconfidence

-tendency to overestimated the accuracy of our knowledge and judgments
-can feed extreme political views
-people who err on the side of __________________ live more happily
-EXP: when BP displayed __________________ and downplayed safety concerns right before the drilling platform exploded and spewed oil into the Gulf of Mexico

Belief Perseverance

-our tendency to cling to our beliefs in the face of contrary evidence
-EXP: believing one thing, being shown evidence the opposite of it, and then still supporting your own belief

Framing

-the way we present an issue
-can sway our decision and judgements
-can be a powerful persuasion tool because carefully posed options can nudge people toward decisions that could benefit them or society as a whole (such as encouraging people to be organ donors, nudging employees to save for their retirement, or boosting student morale)

Creativity

-ability to produce ideas that are both novel and valuable
-supported by certain level of aptitude
-5 components:
1) expertise
2) imaginative thinking skills
3) venturesome personality
4) intrinsic motivation
5) creative environment

Convergent

-__________________ thinking narrows the available problem solutions to determine the single best solution
-EXP: SAT requires this because it only has one right answer

Divergent

-__________________ thinking expands the number of possible problem solutions
-creative thinking that goes in different directions

Language

our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate writing

Phonemes

-smallest distinctive sound units in a language
-English uses about 40
-EXP: the word "bat" has the 3 __________________: b, a, and t
-EXP: the word "that" has the 3 __________________: th, a, and t

Morphemes

-smallest language units that carry meaning
-most combine 2 or more phonemes
-some are words and others are parts of words
-every word in a language contains one or more of these
-EXP: the word "readers" has 3 __________________: "read", "er" (signaling we mean one who reads), and "s" (signaling that we mean not one, but multiple readers)

Grammar

system of rules that enables us to communicate by deriving mining from sounds (semantics) and ordering words into sentences (syntax)

Syntax

the correct way to string words together to form sentences

Receptive

__________________ language:
-babies ability to understand what is said to and about them
-development of this is marked when babies recognize that "ah" comes from wide open lips and "ee" comes from a mouth with corners pulled back (babies prefer to looks a face that matches a sound)
-babies language comprehension greatly outpaces their language production
-at 7 months babies are able to segment spoken sounds into individual words

Productive

__________________ language:
-when a baby's ability to produce words matures
-babbling stage --> one-word stage --> two-word stage (telegraphic speech)

Babbling

__________________ stage:
-stage of speech development in which the infant spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to the household language
-begins at about 4 months
-many of the sounds are consonant-vowel pairs form by simply bunching the tough in the front of mouth (da-da or na-na) or by opening and closing the lips (ma-ma)
-includes sounds from various languages, so by about 10 months is when a trained ear can identify the baby's household language

One Word

__________________ stage:
-stage in speech development when a child speaks mostly in single words
-from about age 1 to 2
-are now able to use sounds to communicate meaning
-babies firsts words are often nouns that label objects or people
-EXP: hearing "look at the fish" and then the child focusing his attention to the fish and begins to look at it

Two Word

__________________ stage:
-stage in speech development during which a child speaks mostly in two-word sentences
-begins at about age 2
-when they start uttering words in telegraphic speech

Telegraphic Speech

-early speech stage in which. cild speaks like a telegram, using mostly nouns and verbs
-EXP: "go car"

Aphasia

-impairment of a language
-usually caused by left hemisphere damage either to Broca's area or to Wernicke's area
-some people can speak fluently but cannot read, while others can comprehend what they read but cannot speak

Brochas Area

-controls language expressions
-an area of the frontal lobe, usually int he left hemisphere, that directs the muscle movements involved in speech
-damage to this area can result in a person struggling to speak words while still being able to ingles familiar songs and comprehend speech
-involves motor cortex

Wernickes Area

-controls language receptions
-brain area involved in language comprehensions and expression
-usually in the left temporal lobe
-damage to this area can result in people being able to only speak meaningless sentences and in people's ability to understand
-involves auditory cortex

Linguistic Determinism

-Whorf's hypothesis that language determines the way we think
-considered to be too extreme because our may not determine what we think, but they do influence our thinking

Mental Practice

-uses visual imagery to mentally rehearse future behaviors, activating some of the same brain areas used during the actual behaviors
-visualizing the details of the process is more effective than visualizing only the end goal

Intelligence

mental potential to learn from experience, solve problems, and use knowledge to adapt to new situation

General Intelligence (g)

-according to Charles Spearman, this underlies specific mental abilities and is therefore measured by every task on an intelligence test
-distinct abilities tend to cluster together and to correlate enough to define a general underlying factor (distinct brain networks enable distinct abilities, with __________________ explained by their coordinated activity)
-predicts important social outcomes such as educational and occupational levels far better than any other trait
-EXP: natural born athlete can have running speed and throwing accuracy can correlate even though they 2 different and distinct activities

Savant Syndrome

a condition in which a person otherwise limited in mental abilities has an exceptional specific skill such as computation or drawing

Triarchic

__________________ theory:
proposed by Robert Sternberg, and he says that there is more to success than traditional intelligence and that we have these 3 intelligence:
1) analytical intelligence (school smarts)
2) creative intelligence (ability to react adaptively to new situation and generate novel ideas)
3) practical intelligence (street smarts)

Multiple Intelligences

this was proposed by Howard Gardner who identified 9 relatively independent intelligences:
1) naturalist
2) linguistic
3) logical-mathematical
4) musical
5) spatial
6) bodily-kiniesthetic
7) interpersonal
8) interpersonal
9) existential intelligence

Emotional

-__________________ intelligence is the ability to perceive, understand, range, and use emotions
-people who have this type of intelligence are both socially aware and self-aware
-those who score high on managing emotions enjoy higher-quality interactions with friends; avoid being hijacked by emotions such as depression, anxiety, or anger; can read other's emotional cues and know what to say to soothe a grieving friend, encourage a workmate, and manage a conflict; and often succeed in career, marriage, and parenting situations where academically smarter people might fail

Intelligence Test

-assesses people's mental abilities and compares them with others, using numerical scores
-can be classified as either an aptitude test or an achievement test

Aptitude

-__________________ test: designed to predict a person's future perfomrce
-capacity to learn

Achievement

__________________ test: designed to assess what a person has learned

Mental Age

-measure of intelligence test performance devised by Binet
-chronological age that most typically corresponds to a given level of performance
-EXP: a child who does as well as an average 8-year-old is said to have a __________________ of 8

Alfred Binet

-he hoped that determining mental age would help identify appropriate school placements for children (started in Paris)
-tended toward an environmental explanation of intelligence differences

Lewis Terman

-a Stanford University professor who found that Paris-developed questions and age norms worked poorly with California schoolchildren
-adapted, added, and established new items and standards for various ages for intelligence tests in America
-created the Stanford-Binet
-assumed certain ethnic groups were naturally more intelligent, and he supported the controversial eugenic movement, which aimed to protect and improve human genetic quality through selective sterilization and breeding

Stanford Binet

widely used American revision of Binet's original intelligence test

IQ (Intelligence Quotient)

-originally defined as the rate of mental age (ma) to chronological age (ca)
-on contemporary intelligence tests, its the average performance for a given age is a assigned a score of 100
-__________________=ma/ca x 100

WAIS (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale)

-contains verbal and performance (nonverbal) subtests
-this and its companion versions for children are the most widely used intelligence test
-consists of 15 subtests including similarities, vocabulary, block design, and letter-number sequencing
-yields both an overall intelligence score and individual scores
-has an average score of 100

Standardization

defining uniform testing procedures and meaningful scores by comparison with the performance of a pretested group

Reliability

-extent to which a test yields consistent results, as assesses by the consistency of scores on 2 halves of the test, on alternative forms of the test, or on retesting
-if 2 sets generally agree, or correlate, then the test is __________________; higher correlation means higher __________________
-does not necessary ensure validity

Validity

-extent to which a test measures or predicts what it is supposed/promised to
-EXP: using a miscalculated tape measure to measure peoples height's: test is reliable encase people's height would be the same, but test has no __________________ because you're not giving the information you promised: real height

Content

-__________________ validity: extent to which a test samples the behavior (criterion) that is of interest
-EXP: road test for a driver's license has __________________ validity because it samples the tasks a drier routinely faces

Predictive

-__________________ validity: success with which a test predicts the behavior it is designed to predict
-assessed by computing the correlation between test scores and the criterion behavior

Crystallized

__________________ intelligence: our accumulated knowledge as reflected in vocabulary and analogies tests (increases up to old age)

Fluid

__________________ intelligence: our ability to reason speedily and abstractly, as when solving logic problems (decreases beginning in the 20s and 30s)

Longitudinal

__________________ studies: research in which the same people are restudied and retested over a long period

Cross Sectional

__________________ studies: study in which people of different ages are compared with another

Intellectual Disability

-condition of limited mental ability and difficulty adapting to the demands of life
-indicated by an intelligence test score of 70 or below
-formally referred to as mental retardation

Down Syndrome

condition of mild to severe intellectual disability and associated physical disorder caused by an extra copy of chromosome 21

Heritability

-proportion of variation among individuals that we can attribute to genes
-this may vary depending not eh range of populations and environments studied (range from 50-80%)

Stereotype Threat

-self-confirming concern that one will be evaluated based on a negative stereotype
-this can impair your attention, performance, and learning
-EXP: why women tend to perform more poorly when they believe their online chess opponent is male