Cognitive

Psychology
 Cognitive process
• One of the higher mental processes, such as
perception, memory, language, problem solving,
and abstract thinking.

• Cognition- Processes of knowing, including

attending, remembering, and reasoning; also the
content of the processes, such as concepts and
memories.
The interdisciplinary
field of study of
systems and processes
that manipulate
information.
• It is midnight. There’s a knock on your door.
When you answer, no one is there, but you see
an envelope on the floor. Inside the envelope is a
single sheet of paper with a handwritten
message: “The cat is on the mat.”

• What do you make of this?

Discovering the Processes of Mind
• One of the fundamental methodologies for
studying mental processes was devised, in 1868,
by the Dutch physiologist F. C. Donders
(1818–1889).

• To study the “speed of mental processes,”

Donders invented a series of experimental tasks.
 Donders’s Analysis of Mental Processes
Note how long (in seconds) it takes you to complete each of these
three tasks. Try to complete each task accurately, but as quickly as
possible.

• Task 1: Draw a C on top of all the capitalized

letters:
• Task 2: Draw a V on top of the capitalized vowels
and a C on top of the capitalized consonants:
• Task 3: Draw a V on top of all the capitalized
letters:
• Serial processes- Two or more mental processes that are
carried out in order, one after the other.
• Processes are serial when they take place one after the other.
Suppose you’re in a restaurant and you need to decide what to
order. You focus on entries one at a time and then judge whether
they qualify as “yes,” “no,” or “maybe.” For each entry, your
judgment processes follow your reading processes.

• Parallel processes -Two or more mental processes that are

carried out simultaneously.
• Processes are parallel when they overlap in time. When it comes
time to place your order, the language processes that enable you
to understand the waiter’s question (“What can I get for you?”)
are likely to operate at the same time as the processes that allow
you to formulate your reply.
• How would you describe
this person to a friend?

• How might your

description change if
your friend were blind?

• How would your

description change?
• Language production- What people say,
sign, and write, as well as the processes they go
through to produce these messages.

• Audience design - The process of shaping a

message depending on the audience for which it
is intended.
• Each time you produce an utterance, you must
have in mind the audience to whom the utterance
will be directed, and what knowledge you share
with members of that audience .

• Paul Grice (1975) defined four maxims that

cooperative speakers live by.
• 1. Quantity
• 2. Quality
• 3. Relation
• 4. Manner
• 1. Quantity: Make your contribution as informative as is required
(for the current purposes of the exchange). Do not make your
contribution more informative than is required.

• The consequence for the speaker: You must try to judge how much
information your audience really needs. Often this judgment will
require you to assess what your listener is likely to know already.

• 2. Quality: Try to make your contribution one that is true. Do not

say what you believe to be false. Do not say that for which you lack
adequate evidence.

• The consequence for the speaker: When you speak, listeners will
assume that you can back up your assertions with appropriate
evidence. As you plan each utterance, you must have in mind the
evidence on which it is based.
3. Relation: Be relevant.

• The consequence for the speaker: You must make sure that
your listeners will see how what you are saying is relevant
to what has come before. If you wish to shift the topic of
conversation—so that your utterance is not directly relevant
—you must make that clear.

4. Manner: Avoid obscurity of expression. Avoid ambiguity.

Be brief. Be orderly.

• The consequence for the speaker: It is your responsibility to

speak in as clear a manner as possible. Although you will
inevitably make errors, as a cooperative speaker you must
ensure that your listeners can understand your message.
• Herbert Clark (1996) suggested that language users have
different bases for their judgments of common ground:

• Community membership. Language producers often make

strong assumptions about what is likely to be mutually known
based on shared membership in communities of various sizes.

• Copresence for actions. Language producers often assume

that the actions and events they have shared with other
conversationalists become part of common ground. This includes
information discussed in earlier parts of a conversation (or in past
conversations).

• Perceptual copresence. Perceptual copresence exists when a

speaker and a listener share the same perceptual events (sights,
sounds, and so on).
• W. A. Spooner of Oxford University, who lent his
name to the term spoonerism: an exchange of the
initial sounds of two or more words in a phrase or
sentence.
• When, for example, he was tongue-lashing a lazy
student for wasting the term, Spooner said, “You have
tasted the whole worm!” A spoonerism is one of the
limited types of speech errors that language producers
make. These errors give researchers insight into the
planning that goes on as speakers produce utterances.
 Language Understanding

• What does the word bank mean?

• one having to do with rivers and the other having to do
with money.

• Suppose you hear the utterance “He came from the

bank.” How do you know which meaning is
intended?

• You need to be able to resolve the lexical ambiguity

between the two meanings. (Lexical is related to lexicon,
a synonym for dictionary.) If you think about this
problem, you’ll realize that you have some cognitive
processes that allow you to use surrounding context to
eliminate the ambiguity—to disambiguate—the word.
• To their surprise, the bark was unusual because it
sounded high-pitched and hoarse.

• When you read this sentence, how do you interpret the word bark?

• If you imagine that you have a dictionary in your head, your entry
for bark might look something like this:
• Definition 1. The exterior covering of a tree.
• Definition 2. The sound a dog makes.

Research suggests that both definitions become accessible in memory

when you first encounter such an ambiguous word, but you swiftly
use contextual information to determine which definition is
appropriate. The word bark is called a balanced ambiguity
because people use its two meanings with roughly equal frequency
• Last year the pen was abandoned because
it was too dirty for the animals to live in.

• Did that sentence give you any trouble?

Pen also has two definitions:

• Definition 1. An implement for writing with ink.
Definition 2. An enclosure for animals.

Pen is called a biased ambiguity because people

use one meaning (that is, Definition 1) much more
often than the other.
 The Products of Understanding
• We shift attention to the products of understanding. The
question now is: What representations result in memory
when listeners understand utterances or texts?
• What, for example, would be stored in memory when
you hear the old standby “The cat is on the mat”?
Research has suggested that meaning representation
begins with basic units called propositions.

• Propositions are the main ideas of utterances. For

“The cat is on the mat,” the main idea is that something
is on something else.
Language, Thought, and Culture

• linguistic relativity - The hypothesis that the

structure of the language an individual speaks
has an impact on the way in which that
individual thinks about the world.
 Visual Cognition
• Imagine that you have a large piece of blank
paper. In your mind, fold it in half (making two
layers), fold it in half again (four layers), and
continue folding it over 50 times. About how thick
is the paper when you are done?

• The actual answer is about 50 million miles-

approximately half the distance between Earth and
the sun. Your mind’s eye was overwhelmed by the
information you asked it to represent.
 Problem Solving
• Mental steps will almost certainly include the cognitive
processes that make up problem solving and
reasoning.

• Problem solving - Thinking that is directed toward

solving specific problems and that moves from an initial
state to a goal state by means of a set of mental operations.

• Reasoning -The process of thinking in which conclusions

are drawn from a set of facts; thinking directed toward a
given goal or objective.
• What goes on four legs in the morning, on two
legs at noon, and on three legs in the twilight?

• According to Greek mythology Oedipus had to

recognize elements of the riddle as metaphors.
Morning, noon, and twilight represented different
periods in a human life. A baby crawls and so
(effectively) has four legs, an adult walks on two legs,
and an older person walks on two legs but uses a cane,
making a total of three legs. Oedipus’s solution to the
riddle was humans.
Try to connect all nine dots using four straight lines without lifting your
pen from the paper or retracing the same line.
 You are given three water jugs each of which holds a different amount of water.
For example, in the first problem the jugs hold 21 quarts, 127 quarts, and 3 quarts
respectively. For each problem, you need to pour water among the three jugs to
obtain the desired quantity of water. Try to solve each of the three problems.
 Solve the problems:
1. Yesterday, when Jane went to sleep, she turned off the light and
then got into bed. Her bed is located 10 feet from the light switch,
but she got into bed before the room became dark. How can this
be?

2. A princess was imprisoned in a tower. She had a rope, but the

rope was only 25 feet long and the window in her room was 75 feet
from the ground. She divided the rope into three pieces, tied them
together, and escaped. How did she do it?

3. Suppose we have four pieces of chain, each made up of three links.

If it costs 2 cents to open a link and 3 cents to close it and we only
have 15 cents, how can we join the pieces of chain to form a ring?
Answers:
• 1. Jane got into bed while it was still daytime

• 2. The princess divided the rope by unraveling it

into three thinner ropes.

• 3. open one set of three links and use these to

join the other pieces of chain.
• problem space - The elements that make up a
problem: the initial state, the incomplete
information or unsatisfactory conditions the
person starts with; the goal state, the set of
information or state the person wishes to
achieve; and the set of operations, the steps
the person takes to move from the initial state to
the goal state.

• Algorithm- A step-by-step procedure that

always provides the right answer for a particular
type of problem.
• Divergent thinking - An aspect of creativity
characterized by an ability to produce unusual
but appropriate responses to problems.

• Convergent thinking - An aspect of creativity

characterized by the ability to gather together
different sources of information to solve a
problem.
Unscramble the Anagrams and write the words. As
soon as possible.
1. H-U-L-A-G
2. P-T-T-M-E
3. T-R-H-O-S
4. T-N-K-H-G-I
5. T-E-W-I-R
6. L-L-A-O-W
7. R-I-D-E-V
8. O-C-G-H-U
9. T-E-N-R-E
10. C-I-B-A-S
1. H-U-L-A-G - Laugh
2. P-T-T-M-E - Tempt
3. T-R-H-O-S - Short
4. T-N-K-H-G-I - Knight
5. T-E-W-I-R - Write
6. L-L-A-O-W - Allow
7. R-I-D-E-V - Drive
8. O-C-G-H-U - Cough
9. T-E-N-R-E - Enter
10. C-I-B-A-S - Basic
 Deductive Reasoning
• Suppose you are on your way to a restaurant and you want to pay
for your meal with your only credit card, American Express. You
call the restaurant and ask, “Do you accept American
Express?” The restaurant’s hostess replies, “We accept all
major credit cards.” You can now safely conclude that they
accept American Express.

• To see why, we can reformulate your interchange to fit the

structure of the syllogism.

• Premise 1. The restaurant accepts all major credit cards. Premise 2.

American Express is a major credit card.
• Conclusion. The restaurant accepts American Express.
 What is the difference between inductive reasoning and
deductive reasoning?

• Inductive reasoning (or data-driven reasoning) -

Reasoning from specific information to a general conclusion.
• Deductive reasoning (or theory-driven reasoning) -
Reasoning from general premises to specific instance.
• Choosing the A is obviously valuable because the rule says that vowels must have
even numbers. If the A has an even number this fits the rule, but if it has an odd
number the rule is false.
• The 7 is also informative because if the 7 has a vowel on the reverse, we would
know the rule is false.
• People might instead choose the 6, but notice that the 6 is actually uninformative
because the rule doesn’t say anything about what even numbers must have.
• You should turn over the Driving card to see if
the person has a license and the No License
card to see if the rule has been violated.
 Judgment and Decision Making
• Much of judgment and decision making is guided
by heuristics—mental shortcuts that can help
individuals reach solutions quickly.
• Availability, representativeness, and anchoring all
allow for efficient judgments under uncertainty.
• Decision making is affected by the way in which
different options are framed.
• The possibility of regret makes some decisions
hard, particularly for individuals who are
maximizers rather than satisficers.
 Practice Time

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