PSY 101 Cognition and Intelligence Lecture Notes

Macey Trachier
General Psychology

Cognition and Intelligence
What is Thinking?
• Cognition
o The process of thinking, gaining knowledge, and dealing with knowledge
• Two components
o Experiential processing
o Reflective processing
Basic Unit of Thought
• Mental images
o Pictures or visual depictions use in memory and thinking
▪ Components
• Help make decisions
• Change feelings
• Improve skills
• Aid our memory
• Concept
o Mental category for classifying things based on common features
• Language
o Consists of words or symbols and rules for combining them
Forming Concepts
• Concept formation
o Process of classifying information into meaningful categories
▪ Conjunctive: two or more features in common
▪ Disjunctive: at least one of several features
▪ Prototype: ideal model used as a prime example
Language

• Linguistic relativity hypothesis
o The words we use reflect our thoughts but can shape them as well
• Structure of language
o Phonemes: basic speech sounds
o Morphemes: smallest meaningful units in a language
o Grammar: set of rules for combining language into meaningful speech or writing
• Semantics
o Processing of language
▪ The catch: language can be a barrier or a bridge