David G.

Myers 10th Edition

 Thinking
 Language
 Thinking & Language
 Animal Thinking & Language
 Pages 336-363
 “Our species, by refining ideas over time, has
the collective genius to invent the camera,
the car, the computer; to unlock the atom
and crack the genetic code; to travel into the
ocean’s depths and into outer space”.
 As we think we form concepts that organize
our world
 We solve problems
 We make decisions
 We make judgments
 Thinking
 Refers to all of the mental activities
associated with processing, understanding,
remembering, and communicating
 We simplify things in order to think about
countless events, objects, and people in our
world
 Mental groupings of similar objects, events,
and people (a stereotype)
 Example: Chair
▪ Baby chair
▪ Reclining chair
▪ Dinning room chair
▪ Dentist chair
 Concepts provide us with massive amounts of
information without much cognitive effort

 To simplify things further, we organize our

concepts into hierarchies
 School
▪ Classrooms
▪ Desk row
 Desk
 We form our concepts by developing
prototypes
 A mental image or best example that incorporates
all the features we associate with a category
▪ A bird
 If something fails to match our prototype, we
may have trouble classifying it
 Platypus

What the heck is it?

 Another skill, other than forming and using
concepts, is the ability to solve problems
The Tower of Hanoi

The goal state is described by these discs

being stacked on the third pegs (the “end-
peg“) in exactly the same order.
There are three operators:
You are allowed to move one single disc
from one peg to another one
You are only able to move a disc if it is on
top of one stack
A disc cannot be put onto a smaller one.
 Algorithms
 Step-by-step procedure that guarantees a
solution
 Heuristics
 We often solve problems with simple strategies
 Insight
 Sudden flashes of inspiration
 Sometimes the answers may elude us
 Two cognitive tendencies include:
▪ Confirmation Bias
▪ Fixation
 What will happen when you die?
 A tendency to search for information that
confirms one’s perceptions or our ideas

 We seem to seek evidence that will verify our

ideas more eagerly than we seek evidence
that might refute them
 Once people have a wrong idea they often
will not budge from their logic
 Think of these very bizarre concepts:
 Incest should not be taboo
 Child brides should be the norm
 Arranged marriages are better than what we have
now
 Selling children would help our economy and the
American family
 The inability to see a problem from a new
perspective; an impediment to problem
solving

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=PqJMQYRwAeE
 Once we incorrectly represent the problem
its hard to restructure how we approach it

 Reasons
 Mental Set
 Functional Fixedness
 Solutions that work in the past often work on
new problems (complacenticy)(pickup line)
 A mental set predisposes how we think
 It is a tendency to approach a problem in a
particular way, usually in a way that has
worked in the past, but it may not be helpful
solving a new problem
 This is our tendency to perceive the functions
of objects as fixed and unchanging

 Lateral Thinking is needed- looking for the

solution from many different angles

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=rNDuGuerpf8
 We seem to seldom take the time and effort
to reason systematically

 We just follow our intuition

 We fly by the seat of our pants

 Have you ever taken time to think, why you think, “cute is
cute”, or “cool is cool”, or why something is even popular to
you and your peers???
 Intuitive judgments are
instantaneous
 But the price for efficiency
is:
▪ Bad judgment
▪ Sometimes smart people do
dumb things
 To judge the likelihood of things in terms of
how well they represent particular prototypes

 Example: A short, thin man likes to read poetry

▪ Is this person an Ivy League professor?
▪ Or is this person a truck driver?
 We intuitively compare things with our
mental representation of that category, if the
two match, that fact usually overrides other
considerations of statistics or even logic

 “Generally speaking, did you know that the

average person has one ovary and one
testicle….its true…”
 When we base our judgments on the
availability of information in our memory
 If a memory of an event comes quickly we assume
the information is common
 A tendency to overestimate the accuracy of
our knowledge and judgments

 To be more confident than correct

 Confident people are not always accurate

 Ironically, people who err on the side of
overconfidence live more happily, find it
easier to make tough decisions, and seem
more credible
 My girlie-friend is going to have back surgery
on the 19th of February, we talked with a
number of doctors, which one should we use?
 While discussing the ins and outs of the
surgery, the doctor informed us that 10% of
patients die from the surgery every year
 While discussing the ins and outs of the
surgery, the doctor informed us that 90% of
patients survive from the surgery
 On your own
 The more we come to appreciate that our
own beliefs might be true, the more we
tightly cling to them
 Read it on your own
 Lets look at ALICE though….
 Language frames much of our thinking, it
also emerges as we mature
 Two main questions are asked:
 What are the elements of language?
 How and why do the develop?
 Our spoken, written, or signed words and the
ways we combine them to communicate
meaning
 Language enables us to communicate
complex ideas from person to person and
transmit civilization’s accumulated
knowledge across generations
 Spoken language consists of three building
blocks
 Phonemes (Fo-Neems)
 Morphemes (More-Feems)
 Grammar
 A set of basic sounds
 English language has about 40
 869 phonemes in human speech
 Change in phonemes produce changes in
meaning
 Sign language also has similar phonemes-like
building blocks
 Hand shapes
 Hand movements
 Smallest unit of language that carries
meaning
 May be a word or a part of a word
 Prefix
 Suffix
 A system of rules that enables us to
communicate with and understand others
 Semantics
 Syntax
 Set of rules by which we derive meaning from
morphemes, words, and sentences in a given
language
 The study of meaning
 The rules for combining words into
grammatically sensible sentences in a given
language
 5000 words a year
 60,000-80,000 words by end of 12th grade
 4 months
 Reading lips
 Babbling stage
▪ 3-4 months
▪ Stage of speech development in which the infant
spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to
the household language
▪ We use all 869 possible sounds, here is where they
dwindle…
 It seems that before nurture molds our
speech it enables a wide range of possible
phonemes
 Eventually our babbling comes to resemble
the sounds, and characteristics of the
household language
 By 10 months, children
can identify the house
language and phoneme;
sounds outside the
infants native tongue
begin to disappear, and
at the same time those
sounds not in the house
language are harder to
master
 At about the fist birthday children enter the
one-word stage
 The stage in speech development during which a
child speaks mostly in single words
 At age two, children enter the two-word
stage
 The stage in which a child speaks mostly two-
word statements
 Language is characterized
by telegraph speech
▪ Early speech
▪ Sounds like a telegraph
▪ “go car”
▪ “daddy bestest”
 Skinner
 Chomsky
 Cognitive Neuroscientists
 Association
 Imitation
 Reinforcement

 “Babies learn to talk in the same ways as

animals learn to peck keys and press a bar”
 In-born universal grammar
 Given adequate nurture to a child, it just happens
to the child
 Thanks to our inborn universal grammar, we
readily learn the specific grammar of whatever
language they hear
 “We are born with the hardware and the
operating system; experience writes the software”
 Statistical Learning
 Learning letter patterns and combinations
suggests babies come with a built in readiness to
learn grammatical rules
 Language influences what we think, perceive,
and remember
 Thinking and language intertwine
 Two interesting question:
 Do our ideas come first and we wait for words to
name them?
 Or are our thoughts conceived in words and
therefore unthinkable without them?
 Linguistic Determinism Hypothesis
 Benjamin Lee Whorf
 Language determines the way we think
 Different languages impose different conceptions
of reality
 “But to those who speak two dissimilar
languages (English & Japanese), it seems
obvious that a person thinks differently in
different languages”
 “Whether we are
deaf, or hearing,
language transforms
experience. Language
connects us to the
past and the future.
Language fuels our
imagination.
Language links us to
one another”
 We often think in images
 Procedural memory
▪ A mental picture
 Do animals think?
 Do animals exhibit
language?
 Animals display remarkable capacities for
thinking
 Forrest-dwelling
chimpanzees have
become natural tool
users
 Yes, animals
communicate
 “Everyone agrees: Humans alone poses
language, if by the term we mean verbal or
signed expression of complex grammar. If we
mean, more simply, the ability to
communicate through a meaningful
sequence of symbols, then apes are indeed
capable of language”