Language, Thought, and Problem Solving

Language

  • Consists of words or word symbols and rules for their combination (grammar).

  • Spoken words: Made up of phonemes, which combine to make morphemes.

  • Word combinations: Must have both syntax (grammar) and semantics (meaning).

  • Structure: Surface structures (word strings) have underlying deep structures (relationships among ideas).

  • Ambiguous sentences: Occur when one surface structure reflects multiple deep structures.

  • Understanding: Guided by context, world knowledge, and nonverbal cues.

  • Child Development: Follows an orderly pattern:

    • Infant vocalizations (babblings).

    • One-word stage of speech.

    • Two-word sentences.

    • Three-word sentences and predictable grammatical forms.

  • Learning process: Children may overgeneralize rules (e.g., regular verb forms).

  • Acquisition: Most grammatical rules acquired by age five.

  • Theories: Conditioning and imitation play roles but don't fully explain grammar acquisition.

  • Biological Programming: Humans may be biologically programmed to learn language.

  • Critical Period: Language acquisition must occur during a certain critical period for normal development.

Basic Functions of Thought

  • Core functions: Describing, elaborating, deciding, planning, and guiding action.

  • Information-processing system: Receives, represents, transforms, and acts on incoming stimuli.

  • Thinking: Defined as the manipulation of mental representations by this system.

Mental Representations: The Ingredients of Thought

  • Forms: Concepts, propositions, schemas, scripts, mental models, images, and cognitive maps.

  • Concepts: Categories of objects, events, or ideas with common properties.

    • Formal concepts: Precisely defined by specific features.

    • Natural concepts: Fuzzy; no fixed defining properties. A prototype is a member displaying most characteristic features.

  • Propositions: Assertions stating how concepts are related (can be true or false).

  • Schemas: Generalized mental representations of concepts, generating expectations.

  • Scripts: Schemas about familiar sequences of events or activities.

  • Mental models: Created by experience to guide understanding and interaction with the world.

  • Mental images: May be manipulated during thinking.

  • Cognitive maps: Mental representations of familiar parts of one's world.

Thinking Strategies

  • Information-processing system allows for reasoning, problem-solving, and decision-making.

  • Formal reasoning: Seeks valid conclusions using rigorous procedures (algorithms).

    • Algorithms: Systematic methods that always reach a correct result (if one exists).

    • Requires considering truth/falsity of assumptions and rules of logic, but people are prone to errors.

  • Informal reasoning: Assesses conclusion validity based on supporting evidence.

    • Errors: Often stem from heuristics (mental shortcuts or rules of thumb).

    • Key heuristics:

      • Anchoring bias (anchoring heuristic): Estimating probability by adjusting an earlier estimate.

      • Representativeness heuristic: Basing conclusions on similarity to other items in a class.

      • Availability heuristic: Estimating probability by how available an event is in memory.

Problem Solving

  • Steps: Diagnosing the problem, then planning, executing, and evaluating a solution.

  • Aids (especially for non-obvious solutions): Incubation and strategies like means-end analysis (decomposition), working backward, and finding analogies.

  • Difficulties:

    • Not easily considering multiple hypotheses.

    • Mental sets: Sticking to an incorrect hypothesis.

    • Functional fixedness: Missing opportunities to use familiar objects in unusual ways.

    • Confirmation bias: Focusing on evidence that supports existing hypotheses.

    • Failing to use absence of symptoms or events as evidence.

  • Improvement: Deliberate practice.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) approaches:

    • Programming computers to imitate logical manipulation of symbols in human thought.

    • Imitating connections among neurons in the human brain (connectionist/neural network models).

  • Creativity: Measured by tests of divergent thinking (vs. convergent thinking in intelligence tests).

    • Requires intelligence, expertise, problem-solving/divergent thinking skills, and motivation.

    • Not highly correlated with intelligence.

Decision Making

  • Challenges: Too many alternatives/features, comparisons of subjective utility, unpredictability/risk.

  • Ideal: People should maximize the expected value of their decisions.

  • Common failures/biases:

    • Perceiving losses differently from gains of equal size.

    • Overestimating rare events; underestimating frequent events.

    • Overconfidence in forecasts.

    • Gambler's fallacy: Believing random processes are affected by previous events.

    • Decisions also influenced by personal and cultural goals beyond maximizing expected value.

  • Group decisions: Tend to show group polarization (selection of more extreme outcomes).

    • Group performance can be effective but may be less efficient than individuals depending on the context.