Psyc Chapter 8
Thinking: A mental activity or processing of info, including learning, remembering, perceiving,
communicating, believing, and deciding
Cognitive Economy: Allows us to simplify what we attend to and keep the info we need for
decision making to manageable minimum (aka “fast and Frugal thinking”) However, it was lead
us to oversimplify- faulty conclusion
Thin Slicing: Ability to extract useful info from small bits of behaviour
Heuristics & Biases
Cognitive Biases: predisposition and default expectations that we use to interpret our experiences
& that operate in our everyday lives
Representativeness heuristic: involves judging the probability of an event based on an event
based on how prevalent that event has been in past experiences
- Ex: if I’m at the dog park and I see a tiny little dog coming toward my dog I might start
worrying that the tiny dog will be a jerk because I’ve had lots of tiny dogs try to bite or
fight with my dog. In my mind, tiny dogs are most likely to be jerks. I could be wrong,
and this new tiny dog could be lovely and well-behaved but the representativeness
heuristic leads me to have an expectation of a certain behaviour
Base Rate: is a fancy term for how common a behaviour or characteristic is in general
Availability heuristic: involves estimating the likelihood of an occurrence based on the ease with
which it comes to our minds
- EX; If someone asks me where to get the best burger in town, I’m probably going to
respond with the name of my local pub. I ate a burger there pretty recently (and enjoyed
it) , and I eat burgers there regularly, so it would pop into my mind very easily
Hindsight Bias: our tendency to overestimate how well we could have predicted something after
it has already occurred ( I knew it all along)
- Compensation by scientific method, but it can have consequences for our real-world
decision making
Top Down Processing: We fill in the gaps of missing information using our
experience and background knowledge which helps us to simplify our cognitive
Function
- Concepts: our knowledge and ideas about a set of objects, actions, and characteristics that
share core properties
- Schema: Are concepts we’ve stored in memory about how certain actions, object, and
ideas related to each other
❖ Helps to mentally organize events
❖ Enables us to draw on our knowledge when we encounter something new
Linguistic Determinism:view that all thought is represented verbally that as a result our language
defines our thinking
- Children can perform many complex cognitive tasks before they can talk about them
- Neuroimaging studies suggest that thought can occur without thinking
,Linguistic Relativity: view that characteristics of language shape our thought processes
- EX; recalling event that happened in Russia when speaking Russian, and being able to
recall events that happened in US when speaking English
8.2 Thinking at it’s hardest
Decision making
Decision Making: is the process of selecting among a set of alternatives
Framing: how we formulate the question about what we need to decided
- EX: If a TV commercial asks you “Would you be willing to pay $500 for this tiny jar of
face cream? That’s what some celebrities pay. But you can have the same benefits for
only $95!” When we hear that original $500 number, we might think that it is too high,
but then $95 seems reasonable in comparison
Problem Solving: is generating a cognitive strategy to accomplish a goal
- Algorithms: step by step learned procedure used to solve problems
❖ EX; replacing the starter on a car, performing a tonsillectomy, or making a
peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.
- Salience of surface similarities
❖ Refers to how attention-grabbing something is
❖ Tend to focus attention on surface level properties of problem
❖ Ignoring the surface features of a problem and focus on the underlying reasoning
needed to solve it
- Mental Set: phenomenon of becoming stuck in a specific problem-solving strategy,
inhibiting out ability to generate alternatives
- Functional Fixedness: difficulty conceptualizing that an object typically used for one
purpose can be used for another
8.3 How Does Language Work?
Language: is a system of communication that combines symbols, such as words or gestural signs,
in rule-based ways to create meaning
- Most obvious is the transmission of info
- Serves key social & emotional functions
4 Features of Languages:
- Phonemes: the sound of our language
- Morphemes: the smallest units of meaningful speech
- Syntax: the grammatical rules that govern how we compose words into meaningful
strings
- Extralingulatic info: elements of communication that aren’t part of the content of
language but are crucial to interpreting its meaning, such as facial expressions and tone of
voice.
Dialect: Language variation used by a group of people who share geographic proximity or ethnic
background
- distinct languages because speakers of two different dialects can for the most part
understand, but may vary in pronunciation, vocab, and syntax of the language
- Speakers of dialect that differ from “standardized” version of the native language aren’t
making pronunciation or grammatical error
, How do children Learn Language
Babbling: refers to any intentional vocalization (sounds other than crying, burping, sighing, and
laughing, which are less intentional) that lacks specific meaning.
One-world stage: early period of language development when children use single-word phrases
to convey an entire thought
Special Cases of Language Learning
Sign Language: Language developed by members of community with hearing loss that uses
visual rather than auditory communication
Bilingual: proficient and fluent at speaking and comprehending two distinct languages
- First language learned , one heard most often as a child and the one most used is the
dominant language
- Bilingual individual have heightened metalinguistic insight: awareness of how language
is structured and used; as a result they tend to perform better on language task in general
Theoretical Accounts of Language Acquisition
The “pure” Nature & Nurture Accounts
- Children learn through imitation
- Very unlikely because language is generative ( allowing an infinite number of unique
sentences to be created by combining words in novel ways)
The Nativist Account
- Children are born with expectations that there will be syntactic rules that influences how
sentences are constructed, and precise rules are developed after expose
- Nativist: account, which says that children come into the world with some basic
knowledge of how language works
- Language acquisition device: Hypothetical construct in the brian in which nativists
believe knowledge of syntax resides
- Weakness: the nativist view is that many of its claims are difficult to falsify
The Social Pragmatic Account
- Social Pragmatic : account of language acquisition that proposes that children infer what
words and sentences mean from context & social interactions
The General Cognitive Processing Account
- proposes that children’s ability to learn language results from general skills that children
apply across a variety of activities.
Challenges:
- children are better at learning languages than adults, whereas adults are better at learning
things in general.
- specific areas of the brain, especially the left temporal lobe, are more active in language
processing than in other types of learning, memory, and pattern recognition activities
Stroop Colour-Naming Task: requires that participants identify the colour of ink uses
- Shows that reading is automatic and hard to inhibit
- Most people have difficulty ignoring the printed word
- Children don’t experience this because their reading is effortful & they can turn off
attention to pay attention to only the ink colour
Learning to Read
Thinking: A mental activity or processing of info, including learning, remembering, perceiving,
communicating, believing, and deciding
Cognitive Economy: Allows us to simplify what we attend to and keep the info we need for
decision making to manageable minimum (aka “fast and Frugal thinking”) However, it was lead
us to oversimplify- faulty conclusion
Thin Slicing: Ability to extract useful info from small bits of behaviour
Heuristics & Biases
Cognitive Biases: predisposition and default expectations that we use to interpret our experiences
& that operate in our everyday lives
Representativeness heuristic: involves judging the probability of an event based on an event
based on how prevalent that event has been in past experiences
- Ex: if I’m at the dog park and I see a tiny little dog coming toward my dog I might start
worrying that the tiny dog will be a jerk because I’ve had lots of tiny dogs try to bite or
fight with my dog. In my mind, tiny dogs are most likely to be jerks. I could be wrong,
and this new tiny dog could be lovely and well-behaved but the representativeness
heuristic leads me to have an expectation of a certain behaviour
Base Rate: is a fancy term for how common a behaviour or characteristic is in general
Availability heuristic: involves estimating the likelihood of an occurrence based on the ease with
which it comes to our minds
- EX; If someone asks me where to get the best burger in town, I’m probably going to
respond with the name of my local pub. I ate a burger there pretty recently (and enjoyed
it) , and I eat burgers there regularly, so it would pop into my mind very easily
Hindsight Bias: our tendency to overestimate how well we could have predicted something after
it has already occurred ( I knew it all along)
- Compensation by scientific method, but it can have consequences for our real-world
decision making
Top Down Processing: We fill in the gaps of missing information using our
experience and background knowledge which helps us to simplify our cognitive
Function
- Concepts: our knowledge and ideas about a set of objects, actions, and characteristics that
share core properties
- Schema: Are concepts we’ve stored in memory about how certain actions, object, and
ideas related to each other
❖ Helps to mentally organize events
❖ Enables us to draw on our knowledge when we encounter something new
Linguistic Determinism:view that all thought is represented verbally that as a result our language
defines our thinking
- Children can perform many complex cognitive tasks before they can talk about them
- Neuroimaging studies suggest that thought can occur without thinking
,Linguistic Relativity: view that characteristics of language shape our thought processes
- EX; recalling event that happened in Russia when speaking Russian, and being able to
recall events that happened in US when speaking English
8.2 Thinking at it’s hardest
Decision making
Decision Making: is the process of selecting among a set of alternatives
Framing: how we formulate the question about what we need to decided
- EX: If a TV commercial asks you “Would you be willing to pay $500 for this tiny jar of
face cream? That’s what some celebrities pay. But you can have the same benefits for
only $95!” When we hear that original $500 number, we might think that it is too high,
but then $95 seems reasonable in comparison
Problem Solving: is generating a cognitive strategy to accomplish a goal
- Algorithms: step by step learned procedure used to solve problems
❖ EX; replacing the starter on a car, performing a tonsillectomy, or making a
peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.
- Salience of surface similarities
❖ Refers to how attention-grabbing something is
❖ Tend to focus attention on surface level properties of problem
❖ Ignoring the surface features of a problem and focus on the underlying reasoning
needed to solve it
- Mental Set: phenomenon of becoming stuck in a specific problem-solving strategy,
inhibiting out ability to generate alternatives
- Functional Fixedness: difficulty conceptualizing that an object typically used for one
purpose can be used for another
8.3 How Does Language Work?
Language: is a system of communication that combines symbols, such as words or gestural signs,
in rule-based ways to create meaning
- Most obvious is the transmission of info
- Serves key social & emotional functions
4 Features of Languages:
- Phonemes: the sound of our language
- Morphemes: the smallest units of meaningful speech
- Syntax: the grammatical rules that govern how we compose words into meaningful
strings
- Extralingulatic info: elements of communication that aren’t part of the content of
language but are crucial to interpreting its meaning, such as facial expressions and tone of
voice.
Dialect: Language variation used by a group of people who share geographic proximity or ethnic
background
- distinct languages because speakers of two different dialects can for the most part
understand, but may vary in pronunciation, vocab, and syntax of the language
- Speakers of dialect that differ from “standardized” version of the native language aren’t
making pronunciation or grammatical error
, How do children Learn Language
Babbling: refers to any intentional vocalization (sounds other than crying, burping, sighing, and
laughing, which are less intentional) that lacks specific meaning.
One-world stage: early period of language development when children use single-word phrases
to convey an entire thought
Special Cases of Language Learning
Sign Language: Language developed by members of community with hearing loss that uses
visual rather than auditory communication
Bilingual: proficient and fluent at speaking and comprehending two distinct languages
- First language learned , one heard most often as a child and the one most used is the
dominant language
- Bilingual individual have heightened metalinguistic insight: awareness of how language
is structured and used; as a result they tend to perform better on language task in general
Theoretical Accounts of Language Acquisition
The “pure” Nature & Nurture Accounts
- Children learn through imitation
- Very unlikely because language is generative ( allowing an infinite number of unique
sentences to be created by combining words in novel ways)
The Nativist Account
- Children are born with expectations that there will be syntactic rules that influences how
sentences are constructed, and precise rules are developed after expose
- Nativist: account, which says that children come into the world with some basic
knowledge of how language works
- Language acquisition device: Hypothetical construct in the brian in which nativists
believe knowledge of syntax resides
- Weakness: the nativist view is that many of its claims are difficult to falsify
The Social Pragmatic Account
- Social Pragmatic : account of language acquisition that proposes that children infer what
words and sentences mean from context & social interactions
The General Cognitive Processing Account
- proposes that children’s ability to learn language results from general skills that children
apply across a variety of activities.
Challenges:
- children are better at learning languages than adults, whereas adults are better at learning
things in general.
- specific areas of the brain, especially the left temporal lobe, are more active in language
processing than in other types of learning, memory, and pattern recognition activities
Stroop Colour-Naming Task: requires that participants identify the colour of ink uses
- Shows that reading is automatic and hard to inhibit
- Most people have difficulty ignoring the printed word
- Children don’t experience this because their reading is effortful & they can turn off
attention to pay attention to only the ink colour
Learning to Read
