What do we think about?

Cognition

• Latin root: “to think”

• the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses

Thoughts as Concepts

Concept - Mental category that groups by common properties

• Ex. Arabian, Quarter, Thoroughbred, Clydesdale, Mustang

Basic Concept - Concepts that have a moderate number of instances that make it easier to acquire

Prototype - Representation of a category, averaging all members together

• Prototype for dogs?

  • Ears

  • Eyes

  • Snout

  • Height

  • Length

Exemplar - Your specific member representing your category

• Ex. Sports. What sport comes to mind? Why?

Theories against theories

• Theories - Using concepts as the framework of theories

• Ex. Difference between dog and squirrel (in class example)

Schemas - Integrated mental network of knowledge, beliefs, and expectations concerning a particular topic or aspect of the world

• Ex. First thought of a firefighter being a man or a nurse being a female

Solving Problems

Problem - Situation in which a current state is separated from an ideal state by obstacles

Problem Solving - Use of information to meet a specific goal

• Evaluating the success of various strategy

Understand the Problem

Concept of how you interpret your problem

• Ex. Gaining weight after having a baby

  • Is it the outcome of pregnancy or is my scale broken?

• Functional Fixedness: tendency to see objects as only working in a particular way

  • Ex. Can’t open bottles without bottle opener so you can’t open it

Make a Plan

Algorithm - Precise step-by-step of rules that will reliability generate a solution to the problem

• Ex. Doctor diagnosing you in the Emergency Room

Heuristic - Shortcut in problem-solving

• Availability heuristic: frequency of event’s occurrence is predicted by the ease in which an event is brought to mind

  • Ex. Shark Attacks

    • Shark Week and Media Exposure of Sharks

    • Actual Likelihood: 1.625 in a million

    • Having an extra finger or toe: 1 in 500

    • Acceptance into Harvard: 1 in 100

    • Injured from a toilet: 96.4 in 100,000

    • Getting struck by lightning 94 in a million

• Representativeness heuristic: stimuli similar to the prototype are believed to be more likely

• Recognition heuristic: higher value is placed on the more easily alternative

  • Ex. What to eat in the cafeteria - Hamburger and salad or new Hungarian cuisine

• Affect heuristic: we choose between alternative based on emotional or “gut” reactions

  • Ex. proposal

Utility Theory - Comput the expected outcome by multiplying measures of the usefulness of the outcome by its expected probability

• Ex. Buying a car

Language

Language - System that combines meaningless elements such as sounds or gestures to form a structured form of communication that conveys meaning

Building blocks of language - Humans produce more than 500 phonemes (speech sounds)

• Ex. the c sound in cat

Morphemes - Smallest components of speech that carry meaning

• Prefixes: preschool

• Ending: walked

Language Disorders

Damage to the left hemisphere

Aphasia: Loss of ability to speak or understand language

• Broca's aphasia: Damage to the left frontal lobe, causing slow and simple syllables

  • No inflection in the words

• Wernicke’s aphasia: they can speak but their words are not organized

How do we learn language?

Exposure - Seeing and hearing other people talk

Intelligence

Intelligence - Individuals ability to understand complex ideas, adapt effectively to the environment, learn from experience, engage in reason, and overcome obstacles

Assessing Intelligence - Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon looked into “mental age”

• Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale created by Lewis Terman

  • Intelligence quotient (IQ): measure of an individual intelligence relative to a statistical normal curve

  • Mental Age/Chronological Age x 100

• Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) - more accurate for individuals with high and low intelligence as well as elderly and individuals with language difficulties

Type of Intelligence

General Intelligence - individual’s overall intelligence as opposed to specific abilities

Fluid Intelligence - the ability to think logically without the need to use learned knowledge

• Ex. Uses for a tire

Crystalized intelligence: ability to think logically using specific learned knowledge

• Ex. Multiplication table