PSY–111 General Psychology II Lecture 06 Cognition and Language

Mental Images

• Mental images are representations in the mind of an object or event.
• Every sensory modality may produce corresponding mental images.
• Mental imagery may improve various skills, like those of athletes.
• Piano players who mentally rehearse an exercise show similar brain activity to those who physically practice.

Concepts

• Concepts are mental groupings of similar objects, events, or people.
• They help organize complex phenomena into easier cognitive categories.
• Concepts influence behavior.
• Prototypes are typical, highly representative examples of a concept.
• High agreement exists among people in particular cultures about which examples of a concept are prototypes.
• Concepts enable us to think about and understand more readily the complex world.

Reasoning

• Deductive reasoning: reasoning from the general to the specific.
• Inductive reasoning: reasoning from the specific to the general.

Algorithms and Heuristics

• Algorithms: rules that guarantee a solution to a problem if applied appropriately.
• Heuristics: thinking strategies that may lead to a solution but may sometimes lead to errors.
• Availability heuristic: judging the likelihood of an event based on how easily examples come to mind.
• Familiarity heuristic: preferring familiar things.
• Present bias: the tendency to more heavily weight options that are closer to the present than ones further away.

Problem Solving

• Well-defined problem: the nature of the problem itself and the information needed to solve it are available and clear.
• Ill-defined problem: the specific nature of the problem be unclear, the information required to solve the problem may be even less obvious.
• Arrangement problems: rearrange or recombine elements of the problem in a way that will satisfy specific criteria
• Inducing structure problems: identify the existing relationships among the elements presented in the problem and then construct a new relationship among them
• Transformation problem consist of an initial state, a goal state, and a method for changing the initial state into the goal state

Preparation

• Understanding and Diagnosing Problems involves:
  • Arrangement
  • Inducing structure
  • Transformation
• Representing and Organizing
• Generating Solutions
  • Trial and error
  • Heuristics (means-end analysis)
  • Working backward
  • Forming subgoals
  • Insight

Creativity

• Divergent thinking: generates multiple and novel responses to problems.
• Convergent thinking: views a problem as having a single answer based on knowledge and logic.
• Cognitive complexity: preference for elaborate, intricate, and complex thoughts and solutions.

Grammar

• Phonology: study of phonemes, the smallest basic units of speech that affect meaning.
• Syntax: rules that indicate how words and phrases can be combined to form sentences.
• Semantics: the meaning of words and sentences.

Language Development

• Babbling: Infants make speechlike but meaningless sounds.
• Telegraphic speech: sentences in which only essential words are used.
• Overgeneralization: children employ language rules they have learned, even when doing so results in an error.

The Roots of Language

• Learning-theory approach: language acquisition follows the principles of reinforcement and conditioning.
• Nativist approach: humans are born with an innate linguistic capability that emerges primarily as a function of maturation.
  • States that all the world’s languages share a common underlying structure that is prewired, genetically determined, and universal.
  • Human brain contains an inherited neural system, called universal grammar.
• Interactionist approach: language development is determined by both genetic and social factors.