Chapter Eight
Cognition and Language
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What is Cognition?
Mental activity (i.e. thinking)
that is involved in understanding, manipulating, and communicating about
information.
Entails: paying
attention to information, mentally representing it, reasoning about it, and
making decisions about it.
See p. 308.
Do Animals think?
What about computers?
Concepts
The building blocks of thought.
Definition:
Mental Categories used to class together objects, relations, events,
abstractions, or qualities that have common properties. See page 308.
Prototype:
A concept of a category of objects
or events that serves as a good example of the category.
e.g. What is the prototypical Italian sportscar?
Concept Formation:
These are ways we obtain concepts.
Positive and negative instances
Verbal explanation
Hypothesis Testing
Problem Solving
Algorithm - a systematic procedure that
works invariably when it is applied correctly.
An example would be the systematic random
search: each possible
solution is tested according to a particular set of rules. (Computers can do this.)
See p. 313.
Heuristics - rules of thumb that help us
simplify and solve problems.
Sometimes heuristics are faster and more efficient,
although they do not guarantee success.
E.G. the means-end analysis: we try to evaluate the difference between the
current situation and the goal.
See p. 313.
Mental sets - the tendency to respond to
a new problem with an approach that was successfully used with similar
problems.
Insight - Aha! (See p. 315
)
Incubation Effect - hatching a solution
Functional Fixedness -
the tendency to view an object in terms of its name or familiar usage. (May prevent creative
solutions.)
Judgment and Decision Making
Representativeness heuristic
Making judgments about samples according to the
populations they appear to represent
Availability
heuristic
Estimates of frequency or probability of events are
based on how easy it is to find examples
Anchoring
and adjustment heuristic
Influence
of wording on decision making
Overconfidence
Definition of Language
The communication of information by means of symbols
arranged according to rules of grammar.
Necessary properties:
semanticity - meaningful symbols
infinite creativity
- original sentences
displacement - talk about objects & events in another time
& place.
The Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis:
From
linguist, Whorf.
The view that the language we use determines the way
we view the world.
The indigenous peoples of the arctic have about 60
words for snow!
Does your vocabulary affect the way you think?
Not generally accepted by cognitive scientists. (See page 323.)
Language Development Timetable:
Birth --------------Crying
2 months ---------Cooing
6 months ---------Babbling
18 months -------Holophrases
(single word utterances that convey complex meanings). (2
dozen words). Comprehension
precedes production.
24 months -------2 word phrases (duos).
Early speech is telegraphic.
More Language Development:
Very young children frequently display overextension
& overregularization. Between ages 2 &
3 years: Complex sentences are used,
adding articles, conjunctions, adjectives, pronouns & prepositions. WH questions appear.
By age 3:
asking questions, taking turns, & lengthy conversations.
By age 6: vocabulary as big as 10,000.
By age 7 or 9:
word play emerges.
Theories of Language
Development:
Learning View - (ala Skinner, et al) - emphasizes Nurture:
i.e. imitation, models, shaping, reinforcement, observation, etc. What are the problems?
Nativist View -
emphasizes Nature: the
psycholinguistic theory says that nature/nurture interact via a Language
Acquisition Device (pre-wiring). Leads to notion of a sensitive period.
Bilingualism
Language and diversity: bilingual education
See page 329.