Cognition: Thinking, Problem Solving, Creativity, and Language Study Notes

Cognition (thinking): The mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating.
Cognitive psychologists focus on the study of these mental processes.

Concepts: A mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people.
- Category hierarchies: The organizing of concepts into a hierarchy.
- Prototype: A mental image or best example of a category. For instance, comparing various birds to a prototypical bird like a robin.

Algorithms: A methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem. It is systematic but can be time-consuming.
Heuristic: A simple thinking strategy that allows us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently; faster but may lead to errors.
Insight: A sudden and novel realization of the solution to a problem, differing from strategy-based solutions.

Creativity: The ability to produce novel and valuable ideas, important in problem solving.
- Sternberg’s five components of creativity:
- Expertise
- Imaginative thinking skills
- A venturesome personality
- Intrinsic motivation
- A creative environment

Confirmation bias: The tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions while ignoring contradictory evidence.
Fixation: The inability to see a problem from a new perspective, involving:
- Mental set: An approach to a problem based on past successful methods.
- Functional fixedness: The tendency to think of things only in their usual functions, hindering problem-solving ability.

Representative Heuristic: Judging the likelihood of things in terms of how well they represent particular prototypes, possibly ignoring relevant information.
Availability Heuristic: Estimating event likelihood based on how easily examples come to mind, often influenced by vividness.

Overconfidence: The tendency to overestimate the accuracy of one’s beliefs and judgments.

Belief perseverance: Clinging to initial conceptions even after they have been discredited.
- Example: A person’s final judgment in a case accommodates their initial judgment consistently.

Intuition: An effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or thought, contrasting with explicit, conscious reasoning.

Framing: The way an issue is posed, which can significantly affect decisions and judgments.

Language: Our spoken, written, or signed words and the combinations thereof to communicate meaning.

Phonemes: The smallest distinctive sound units in a language, with English comprising about 40 phonemes.
Morpheme: The smallest unit that carries meaning, which may be a word or part of a word (such as a prefix).
Grammar: A system of rules that facilitates communication and understanding.
Semantics: A set of rules by which we derive meaning from morphemes, words, and sentences.
Syntax: The rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences.

Receptive language: Understanding the language before being able to produce it.
Productive language: The ability to produce language, developing through several stages:
- Babbling stage (around 4 months): Spontaneously uttering sounds unrelated to the household language.
- One-word stage (ages 1 to 2): Speaking mostly single words.
- Two-word stage (around age 2): Forming two-word statements.
- Telegraphic speech: Early speech form using primarily nouns and verbs, e.g., “go car.”

Skinner: Operant Learning: Language is learned through principles such as association, imitation, and reinforcement.
Chomsky: Inborn Universal Grammar: Proposes a language acquisition device and the existence of universal grammar.
Statistical Learning and Critical Periods: The ability to learn language is influenced by statistical learning and sensitive periods for optimal acquisition.

Linguistic determinism (Whorf's hypothesis): Proposes that language influences and determines the way we think.
Bilingual advantage: Cognitive benefits linked to speaking multiple languages.

Cognition is a multifaceted area that encompasses the processes of thinking and language. It involves problem-solving strategies, potential obstacles, decision-making biases, and the intricate structure and development of language.