Chapter 10: The Thinking Mind: Thinking, Language, and Intelligence

• Cognition - Internal processes including thinking, reasoning, and problem-solving

• Cognition is derived from the Latin word “cogitare”

• Knowledge - the entire body of information acquired through study, investigation, and experience

• To manage knowledge - we use mental representations

• Symbolic Representation - A representation that bears no resemblance to the actual object 

• Analogical Representation - A representation that remains some of the characteristics of the real object - Ex. Maps

• Mental image - representation of any sensory experience that is stored in memory - can be retrieved for use later

• Children are particularly likely to - use visual images in their thinking

  • Ex. Study - 2-15% of elementary school children experienced long-lasting and detailed visual image

• Concept formation - humans and many animals are capable of this

• Ex. Study - Pigeons - fish and nonfish slides - pecked at slides with fish and didn’t at slides without fish

• A concept - could describe a group of instances that share overlapping features

• Prototype - results from an averaging of all members of your category - may not even resemble a real instance

• Exemplar - retrieve a specific instance of a concept or an example

• Concept formation - can be a type of theory building

• Theory - A set of facts and relationships between facts that can be used to explain and predict phenomena - can apply to concepts

• Concepts can be viewed as - Part of an interconnected network of memories

• Schema - complex set of beliefs and expectations based on out personal experiences

• Brain activity when thinking about concepts - different parts of the brain activate

  • Asked to name animals - visual cortex

  • Naming tools - frontal and parietal lobe areas - associated with movement

• This is suported by patients with brian

• Our brains are predisposed to distinguish between living and nonliving things

• Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease) - primarily a movement disorder that also affects a person’s ability to form new concepts

• ALS - Concept formation task - correlated with the extent of grey matter loss (in prefrontal and parietal cortices)

• Thinking helps us deal with the many types of problems we face daily

• Problems - well defined or ill defined

• Well-defined problems - have a solution that can be verified as correct or incorrect

• ill-defined problems - have solutions that are evaluated subjectively

• Problem solving - the use of information to meet a specific goal

• Steps to problem solve:

1. Understand the problem

2. Make a plan

3. Carry out the plan

4. Look back

• If the solution doesn’t work - reformulate a plan based on what happened and loop the steps

• Problem solving - mental representations we form relate to how we see the problem

• Long-term problems - easier to solve as smaller goals

• Personal biases - can interfere with good problem solving

• Functional fixedness - a particular type of mental set that refers to a person's tendency to think about an object in its most typical form and no others

• Generating possible solutions - requires time - choose best one to implement

• Generating the most solutions - raises your chances of finding one that will work - removing plans early in the process increases chances for failure

• Algorithms - Some types of problems - step-by-step rules for reaching a particular solution

• Algorithms have the advantage of - producing an accurate solution reliably

• Algorithms are efficient when - run by a computer - cost of human brain can be high

• Heuristics - We often substitute rules of thumb or shortcuts to problem solving

• Another advantage of heuristics - they require far less information than algorithms do - but they do not guarantee a solution

• Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman - identified several heuristics that can produce faulty decisions

• Availability heuristic - used when people predict that events that are easy to think about will be more frequent

  • Ex. Dramatic media reports - shark attacks are more common than they are

• Representativeness heuristic - leads people to estimate that stimuli similar to a prototype are more likely to fit the category than are stimuli different from the prototype

• Heuristics are most likely to fail when a correct solution requires a sophisticated understanding of probability - Ex. Show let’s make a deal - easy to be tricked

• The ability to use heuristics to make quick, effective decisions was a significant adaptive advantage for our ancestors

• Effective heuristic - recognition heuristic - predicts that people will place a higher value on the more easily recognized alternative

• Affect heuristic - how we make important choices - emotional responses - effect each choice to guide our decisions - based on past experience - develop a "gut" reaction - pushing us toward alternatives we expect to produce desirable outcomes

• Utility theory - we compute the expected outcomes of our choices and select the best likely one - multiplying measures of the usefulness of the outcome by its expected probability

• Applying utility theory - useful when faced with an important decision

• The way a problem is represented or framed - can have a large effect on whether it will be solved

• Framing can affect the choice of a solution through its interaction with a person's willingness to select risky solutions - when framed in terms of losses or gains

• Good decision making - can be taught - formal training in decision making - better real-world choices

• To see if your solution is effective - any signs of improvement - evaluation is an ongoing progress

• Maximizers - people who strive to reach the best outcome

• Satisficers - people who are willing to choose outcomes that are merely acceptable

• Satisficing - positively related to well-being and adaptive decision making - have an easier time making decisions

• Maximizing - associated with increased regret, lower life satisfaction, and reduced self-esteem - want to explore all alternatives

• Observing the effects of brain damage on a behaviour - can illuminate the contributions of particular parts of the brain to that behaviour

• Patients with brain damage - often gamble obsessively, turn their personal lives upside down, and become unemployable

• Different levels of activity in the subthalamic nucleus and part of the basal ganglia - associated with fast and more cautious decision making

• Three major brain circuits interact during decision making

  1. Assigns value to situations along the lines of pleasure or pain - involves ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the orbitofrontal cortex, the nucleus accumbens, and the amygdala - gradually comes under the control of the impulse control circuit as we mature and are exposed to the social rules of our community

  2. Impulse control network that controls unwanted responses and includes the lateral prefrontal cortex and the parietal cortex

  3. An attentional circuit monitors significant stimuli and involves the insula, the anterior cingulate cortex, and the amygdala - complex social decision making, such as deciding whom to trust

• Drug addicts behave similarly - people who have brain damage in circuits related to decision making

• Pleasure promised by the drug experience - overwhelms the impact of negative future events

• Addicts - experience exaggerated responses to the potential reward of drug cues and less responsive to other types of reward

• Prefrontal cortex is one of the last parts of the brain to mature - can explain impulsive decisions made by adolescents

• Adolescents impulse control system - relatively weak - might be hypersensitive to reward

• Teens are more likely than young adults to make risky decisions in the presence of their peers

• Language - provides powerful tools for organizing and manipulating our thinking, problem solving, and decision making

• Language allows us to - communicate with people in our immediate vicinity and share the thoughts of people living long ago and in distant places

• The Sapir-Worf hypothesis of linguistic relativity argues that the language we speak influences our perceptions and cognitions

• Linguistic determinism - Language doesn't just influence our thinking but actually determines our experiences

• Whorf"s theory correctly predicted that the use of gender-free words

• Certain complex social behaviours - difficult to conduct without the ability to speak

• A critical gene mutation - FOXP-2 gene - occurring around 100 000 years ago possibly marked the start of modern language

• Africa - one of the first human languages - anthropologists - early humans would migrate successfully to other continents with cooperation based on language

• Many African languages feature more than 100 speech sounds

• Languages are living entities - under constant pressure to change

• Nearly half the world's spoken languages may soon be lost

• Assimilation into larger cultures - speakers stop using their native languages or fail to transmit them to their children

• Humans produce more than 500 phonemes or speech sound

• English features about 45 phonemes

• Phonemes - combined into morphemes

• Morphemes - smallest components of speech that carry meaning

• English contains - approximately 100 000 morphemes - can be used to produce more than a million words

• Language is typically managed by the left hemisphere of the brain

• Aphasia - the loss of the ability to speak or understand language

• Aphasia can cause - damage to reading and writing

• Paul Broca case study - Louis Leborgne - institutionalized for more than 20 years - "tan" was one of a few syllables he could produce - he understood what people would say to him

• Broca performed an autopsy - found significant damage to the patient's left frontal lobe - learned about broca’s area

• Leborgne would be diagnosed with Broca's aphasia

• Broca's aphasia - This condition is characterized by difficulty producing speech

• Carl Wernicke published his observations on another type of language deficit

• Wernicke's aphasia - Affected area of the brain is known as Wernicke's area - located near the primary auditory cortex, located in the temporal lobe

• Wernicke's aphasia affects its comprehension - Speech is rapid and fluent but virtually meaningless

• Language results from some innate capacity shaped by natural selection

• Animals communicate in 3 different ways:

1. An inflexible group of calls for signalling danger and identifying territories

2. Contains signals that communicate magnitude, as in the case of bee dances

3. Animals communicate through sequences of behaviour, as in the case of birdsong

• Chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas - have a part of the brain analogous to the human Broca's area

• In both humans and apes - area shows difference in size - right and the left hemispheres that might be correlated with language ability behaviour of other animals

• Chimpanzee and Gorilla - taught sign language

• Bonobo chimpanzee - understood verbal speech - responded correctly around 72% of the time

• Irene Pepperberg - argues that her parrots demonstrate complex cognitions related to language

• Infants pay more attention to consonants than to vowels by the end of their first year

• Consonants are often more important sources of information for identifying words than vowel

• Learning language occurs differently than many types of learning - no specific instruction is needed

• Between 6 and 12 months of age - children make an important perceptual shift that impacts their subsequent language learning - due to social interaction

• Conversing with children produces greater language competence than reading to them

• Socioeconomic differences impact language acquisition

• Hart and Risley - proposed a "language gap" - characterized by the exposure to as many as 30 million more words - children in wealthier families than in poor families -by the age of 3 years

• Cultural deficit model - poor performance of children from disadvantaged families resulted from low levels of cognitive stimulation

• Linguists Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker - that humans have an inborn capacity for learning language

• Many linguists believe that spoken language was built on existing structures that allow primates to produce gestures

• Several genetic conditions selectively affect individuals' language-learning abilities

• Severe difficulties with the production of language - due to mutation in the FOXP2 gene

• Individuals with intellectual disability experience difficulties with language

• People with Williams syndrome - fluent speakers with large vocabularies

• It’s not unusual for a person of normal to high intelligence to have significant difficulties learning language

• Dyslexia - difficulties in learning to read despite typical intelligence and exposure to adequate teaching methods

• Dyslexia - strongly influenced by genetic factors - differences in the symmetry of the cerebral hemispheres - organization of fibre pathways in each hemisphere

• People with dyslexia are more likely to be left-handed or ambidextrous than people without dyslexia

• Difficulty distinguishing between similar-sounding phonemes or basic speech sounds - Ex. m or n

• Their brains show different patterns of activation during rhyming tasks

• Readers with dyslexia - showed greater activation of Broca's area which participates in speech production

• Bilingual - People who can speak more than one language

• Beliefs of impact of bilingualism on cognitive abilities - early 20th century said that would cause a disadvantage - changed during the 1960s - research of cognitive tasks on English-French bilingual schoolchildren in Montreal

• Bilingual executive advantage (BEA) - Bilingual speakers must engage in cognitive tasks such as switching between languages

• Cognitive benefits of bilingualism - "cognitive reserve" - protection against cognitive decline

• Brain areas involved with multiple languages appear to overlap - The amount of overlap depends on the timing of learning and proficiency in each language

• American Sign Language (ASL) - originated the northeastern United States in the 1800s

• ASL is its own unique language, with its own grammar, sentence structure, and vocabulary

• Langue des Signes Quebecoise (LSQ) spoken by deaf Francophone Canadians

• ASL - language functions - generally found in the left hemisphere of the brain, spatial functions - generally managed by the right hemisphere

• Intelligence - individual's ability to understand complex ideas, to adapt effectively to the environment, to learn from experience, to engage in various forms of reasoning, and to overcome obstacles

• Intelligence represents - an attempt to assign a number to an individual's abilities, allowing that person to be compared with others

• Sir Francis Galton - founded the field of psychometrics - also believed in eugenics

• Galton wrongly believed that intelligence - (and virtually all mental and physical traits) were the result of nature

• Galton believed selectively breeding - can eradicate things like disease, mental illness, and other undesirable human characteristics

• "idiocy" - outdated term used to describe someone whose mental faculties had stopped developing in infancy or childhood

• 1907 - State of Indiana - first place in the world to enforce compulsory sterilization of criminals and the "feeble-minded" housed in state institutions

• 1928 - province of Alberta passed the Sexual Sterilization Act - authorized the forced sterilization of institutionalized persons with undesirable traits - was finally repealed in 1972

• 1995 - Leilani Muir successfully sued the government of Alberta - she had been unknowingly sterilized at the age of 15 while living in the Provincial Training School for Mental Defectives - awarded a lot of money

• Binet and Théodore Simon - relatively bright children behaved cognitively like older children - less intelligent children behaved like younger children

• Intelligence quotient (IQ) - computed by dividing children's mental age by their chronological age and multiplying by 100

• Most frequently used intelligence tests today - Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales and the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS)

• Mean IQ score is set at 100

• Standard deviation for IQ is 15

• Almost all IQ scores - fall within the range of 70-130

• Most IQ tests show relatively good reliability and validity - accurate for school tests

• Correlations between IQ score and performance in mathematics and verbal skills - essential for success in contemporary education are relatively high

• Correlations between IQ score and performance in art and design are lower

• IQ - focus on an individual's overall abilities - while others focus on particular types of abilities

• Charles Spearman - general intelligence (g) factor

• General intelligence (G) - can be divided into fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence

• Fluid intelligence - think logically without needing previously learned knowledge such as seeing patterns in a visual stimulus - Fluid intelligence peaks in young adulthood

• Crystallized intelligence - requires specific, learned knowledge, such as vocabulary or the multiplication tables - crystallized intelligence remains more stable through adulthood

• Robert Sternberg - proposed a triarchic theory of intelligence - combination of analytical, creative, and practical abilities allows people to achieve success

• Augmented theory of successful intelligence claims that success in almost any area of life - depends on creativity, analytic ability, practicality, wisdom

• Student self-perception includes a sense of academic efficacy - lowest self-concept shows highest performance

• Overestimating - one's abilities and achievement can result in poorer performance

• Brain imaging studies demonstrate that standard measures of intelligence positively correlate with overall brain volume

• Scientists have suggested that intelligent brains enjoy - quick, efficient communication of information from one area to another along axon pathways

• Fluid intelligence - negatively affected by damage to the frontal lobes

• Heritability estimates how much of the variability in a characteristic in a population - is because of genes

• Both overall brain size and proportion of grey matter are correlated with intelligence - both are approximately 85 percent heritable

• Flynn effect - increase in IQ scores - Improvements in nutrition and other health factors probably account for some of the change

• World Health Organization - strong correlations between a nation's freedom from serious infectious diseases and its citizens' average IQ scores

• Environmental factors - influence intellectual development, including nutrition and exposure to mentally stimulating activities

• Socioeconomic status - a measure of family income, education, and other class factors, is positively correlated with IQ score

• Intellectual disability - diagnosed in individuals who show deficits in intellectual functioning beginning early in childhood

• Intellectual disability is divided into categories of mild, moderate, severe

• Mild intellectual disability - IQ scores of 55 to 70 - between two and three standard deviations from the mean of 100 - able to reach a grade 6 education

• Mild intellectual disability is frequently called - cultural-familial intellectual disability - results from preventable environmental causes

• Moderate intellectual disability - IQ scores between 40 and 55, or between three and four standard deviations from the mean

• Moderate intellectual disability typically results from genetic or medical conditions - ex. down syndrome - able to reach a grade 2 education

• Severe intellectual disability - IQ scores between 25 and 40, or four to five standard deviations below the mean

• Profound intellectual disability is diagnosed in individuals with IQ scores below 25

• Both severe and profound intellectual disabilities - generally result from serious medical conditions and are identified at birth or early in infancy

• Many children with intellectual disability form insecure attachments with their caregivers

• Language skills are affected depending on the severity of the intellectual disability

• Language deficits - cause poor social skills and peer rejection

• Between 10 and 40 percent of individuals with intellectual disability experience some type of emotional or behavioural disorder - Anxiety, impulsiveness, and mood disorders

• When intellectual disability is more severe - they may engage in pica or self-injurious behaviours

• Individuals with intellectual giftedness - 1 to 3 percent of the population, score two or more standard deviations above the mean or more than 130

• Longitudinal examination of gifted children initiated in 1921 - high IQ scores, averaging 150 - they maintained their high IQ scores, and had good physical health, emotional stability, occupational attainment, and social satisfaction

• Like individuals on the lower extreme of IQ scores - children with high IQ scores benefit from educational opportunities tailored to their abilities

• Gifted students - developmentally appropriate placement (gifted classes)