Week 5 Content

Uniqueness of Human Language

  • Other social species have communication systems and symbols

    • ex. bees with their dance to communicate about direction and location of food sources

    • ex. dolphins with their whistles

  • Human languages are generative

    • We can communicate an indefinite number of ideas by putting symbols (words) together in unique ways

    • We can understand a message thats never been expressed before even if words are combined together in different ways


Phonemes

  • Refers to the smallest units of speech sound

    • Vowels & consonants

  • These can be voiced (throat vibration) or unvoiced ( the consonants or various clicks)

  • We are born with the capacity to learn a wide variety of phonemes

    • We pick up on the phonemes that are used around us

    • Infants focus their sensitivity on native language phonemes and specific phonology (how phonemes are used and combined)


Hierarchical Strucutre of Spoken Language

  • Smallest → Largest

    • Phoneme (smallest unit of speech sound)

    • Morpheme (smallest meaningful linguistic unit)

    • Word

    • Phrase

    • Sentence


Speech Segmentation

  • Distinguishing individual words when hearing a continuous stream of speech

    • “Football is my favorite sport”

      • We don’t say it like how we write it


Phonemic Restoration

  • A top-down process in which the brain automatically fills in missing phonemes using context


Lexical Decision Task

  • Deciding if something is a real word in your language

    • Experimenter shows subject a series of letter combination

      • Some real some arent

    • Subjects have to decide as quickly as possible if whether what you’re looking at is a real word/actual letter combination

  • Reveal effects

    • Some words that aren’t as commonly used, will take longer to identify as being a real word

    • Word Frequency Effect: a rarely used word like chaise isn’t recognized as quickly as words that are used more frequently

    • Conceptual Priming: Even a rarely used word like chaise can be recognized fairly quickly if preceded by conceptually related words

      • ex. like chaise being presented in a list of other furniture words


Spreading Activation Theory

  • Words are related to other words with various strengths and the pattern of neural activity associated with one word partially activates patterns for related words, making them more accessible

    • makes it easier to say things and process things just by hearing one thing

  • ex. if we start with red then we are connected with other words that associated with the word

    • fire, other colors, items that are red, flowers

  • This helps explain some effect that are demonstrated in the lexical decision task

  • This has also been applied to concepts



Humans appear to have evolved innate mechanisms specifically for language

  • Proven as we have brain areas that specialize in language

  • All known societies use language

  • Children are able to learn grammar and vocab quickly

    • This happens even if they don’t talk with their parents

    • Noam Chomsky suggested that children don’t learn language through behavior principles


Fast Mapping

  • Young children are able to learn new word meanings quickly

    • this happens even after hearing them only a few times

  • Examples of Heuristic that can help fasting mapping of new words

    • Will work most of the time!


  • Whole Object Constraint:

    • Assumes words refers to the whole object rather than an attribute (like the color or size) of an object

  • Shape Bias

    • Assumes the name of an object generalizes to other objects of the same shape (rather than to other objects of the same color or position)

  • Mutual Exclusivity

    • Assumes each object has exactly one name, so a new word must be for object that doesn’t already have another known name


Critical Period

  • Refers to the period of development when exposure to a type of stimulus is crucial for a certain ability to be acquired


  • Some have proposed that there is a critical period for language which is also hard to determine

    • Hard to determine since there have been these confounding variable when there have been rare language deficiency occurrences

    • Can’t be studied experimentally since there is a lack of evidence of deprivation tasks


Statistical Learning

  • Unconsciously learning the implicit rules of a system (like grammar) by detecting which patterns occur more frequently than others

    • Ex. we learn how to recognize if a sentence sounds grammatically correct

      • This happens based on if we recognize the sentence being one we have heard before!

    • The best way to learn a language is actually using it!


Self-Directed Speech

  • Speech that is directed toward yourself

  • Starting in childhood we can use self-directed speech (when we talk to ourselves) to guide our behavior and assist our thinking

    • Can be very helpful!

    • also be seen when we have internal dialogue

    • helps us form our thoughts

    • organize

  • When we speech out loud → private speech

  • We have have internal speech → inner speech


Aphasia

  • Loss of some language ability

  • Caused by brain damage, usually from a stroke


  • Broca’s Aphasia

    • Difficultly producing language

  • Wernicke’s Aphasia

    • Difficulty understanding language

    • Can produce fluent but nonsensical speech

  • Anomic Aphasia

    • Difficulty naming objects

    • Happening in region for object naming

  • Global Aphasia

    • Severe difficulty both producing and understanding language

    • Like a combination of all aphasias


  • Wernickes area

    • Damage in this area leads to wernickes

    • In the back temporal left hemisphere

  • Broca’s Area

    • In the frontal lobe of the left hemisphere

  • Language is lateralized to the left hemisphere, which is why both of these areas are found on the left side


Prosody

  • Kind of like the musicality of speech

  • Non-verbal aspects of speech

  • Patterns of pitch, rhythm, loudness in speech

  • Can contribute greatly to the meaning of sentences and the communication of mood and emotion

    • Existed longer than other aspects of language since we used to grunt

  • Involves much more of the right-hemisphere than the verbal aspects of language


Connections between Music and Speech

  • Music and speech use the same toolkit to express emotion

    • Pitch, rhythm, loudness

  • One of the first melodic instruments we had was the voice

  • All known societies have music

    • Music can serve social functions

  • We are responsive to melody early in life (speaking in a singsong voice)

    • Helps us learn the alphabet

    • Infant directed speech uses melody like prosody

  • Music and speech preceded by nonverbal communication

    • shrieks, cries, laughs, grunts, moans


Written Language

  • Unlike for spoken language, we didn’t evolve a specific propensity for written language

  • We didn’t evolve a specific propensity for written language

    • Writing wasn’t invented until after humans evolved into their current form

    • Not all societies use written language

    • Reading and writing typically must be taught whereas spoken language is learned automatically


Linguistic Relativity

  • The idea that which language you speak can influence perception and other cognitive processes

  • Appears to be somewhat true

    • Different language can direct your attention to different things

  • People with a native language that has different color-names for different shades of blue are able to discriminate shades of blue quicker

    • There are some confounding variables so the evidence isn’t completely solid

  • The way people think about time is affected by whether people have future tenses about time

  • There is a debate about how gendered language can influence perception


  • There isn’t strong evidence that the language you speak has a major effect on perception



Judgement and Decision Making



Two Systems for Judgment and Decision Making

  • Type 1 Thinking

    • Fast

    • Automatic

    • Often times uses heuristics

  • Type 2 Thinking

    • Slow

    • Controlled

    • Can be more accurate

    • When there is a high cost to negative consequences

    • Is prefered when there’s plenty of time and the cost of a wrong decision would be high


Attribute Substituion

  • When we can’t directly observe the quality that we want to base our judgement/decision on

    • We substitute some other quality which is more accessible

  • This is what we do when we use heuristics

    • ex. we want to choose the wine that tastes the best and can’t open the bottles

      • We choose the wine that has a higher pricer


Heurisitcs Regarding Likelihood/Frequency

  • When we make decision we use these types of statistics

  • Availability Heuristic: Something is more likely if it comes to mind more easily

    • An example of this being true: birds that have feathers come to mind more easily than birds that don’t

      • Since its easier to think about this we can this about this being more frequent

    • How this can fail: Shark attack may come to mind more easily as being more common when ur at a beach than a heart attack but heart attack are more common

      • Sharks are more available since ur at a beach

  • Representativeness Heuristic: something is more likely if it fits an idealized/stereotypical example

    • Fail: Base rate neglect

      • ex. we are failing to consider how likely someone is to assume a role based on how many people there are in that role in general

        • There are more farmers than librarians

  • Its easier to think about likelihood/frequency in terms of number of occurrences than in terms of percentages or probabilities

    • Its better for us to understand , “50 people went down that path and 2 were attacked”

    • Its hard to understand something if “4% of people who went down that path were attacked by a bear”


Heuristics regarding Value

  • Recognition Heuristic: Something has higher value if you recognize it (it’s familiar to you)

    • ex. you think gain is more valuable than another brand that you’ve never heard about

  • Fluency Heuristic: the thing that comes to mind most quickly (or is recognized first) is the most valuable

    • ex. We assume that musicians that come to mine more easily are better musicians


Anchoring

  • We have a reference point (anchor) can bias decision-making

    • ex. standing beside ur unattractive friend to make u look attractive

    • ex. comparing a bundle price to when you buy the products by themselves

      • Trying to get people to buy a specific item

    • ex. like when you compare the price of an item to what a similar item costs


Covariance/Correlation

  • Both terms refer to how much two variables are related

    • Correlation is the covariance standardized

  • We evolved to be very senstive to covariacen

    • Noticing relationships between variables

      • ex. knowing that thunder comes before lightning

      • allows us to notice patterns and make predictions

  • Makes us susceptible to illusory covariance

    • ie. developing a supersituion of things happening

  • Illusory covariance is strengthened by confirmation bias

    • Where we are purposely seeking out proof to support our superstituion


We dont tend to think like economists

  • Some economists have proposed to make decisions based on maximizing gains (positive utility) versus losses (negative utility)


  • We make decisions based on whats easiest to find reasons to justify

  • The framing (which outcomes are emphasized) of a problem can affect our decissions




Status Quo Bias

  • Preference to stick with the way things are rather than changing

    • Avoiding transaction costs

    • Avoiding losing a sure thing

    • Helps explain the endowment effect

      • Inflating the value of what we have

        • Selling something on Depop for more even though we wouldn’t buy it for the same amount

    • Helps explain the sunk cost effect


Bayesian Inference

  • Becomes more complex when there are multiple pieces of evidence to be considered

    • Since they each will contribute a certain amount of wait to posterior probability

  • Some brain mechanisms may do something similar to Bayesian Inference


Problem-Solving often uses Heuristics

  • Works the vast majority of time, can save energy

  • ex. the hill climbing strategy

    • fdsfsdf

  • ex. Means-end analysis

    • Identify what separates the goal state from the current state, and then identify what available process (the means) can change the current state to the goal state


Creativity often Involves convergent and divergent thinking

  • Convergent Thinking: Finding ways that very different concepts are related

  • Divergent Thinking: Directing your thoughts in new nonobvious directions

    • How many new ideas can you create to connect these ideas