Unit 7B:
Cognition: Thinking, Problem
Solving, Creativity, and
Language
Unit Overview
• Thinking
• Language
• Thinking and Language
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Introduction
• Cognition (thinking)
• Cognitive psychologists
Thinking
Concepts
• Concepts
–Category hierarchies
–Prototype
Solving Problems
Strategies
• Trial and error
• Algorithms
–Step-by-step
• Heuristic
• Insight
Solving Problems
Creativity
• Creativity
• Strernberg’s five components
–Expertise
–Imaginative thinking skills
–A venturesome
personality
–Intrinsic motivation
–A creative environment
Solving Problems
Obstacles to Problem Solving
• Confirmation bias
• Fixation
–Mental set
–Functional fixedness
Solving Problems
Obstacles to Problem Solving
• Confirmation bias
• Fixation
–Mental set
–Functional fixedness
Making Decisions and Forming Judgments
Using and Misusing Heuristics
• The Representativeness Heuristic
Amos Tversky
Daniel Kahneman
Making Decisions and Forming Judgments
Using and Misusing Heuristics
• The Availability Heuristic
Making Decisions and Forming Judgments
Overconfidence
• Overconfidence
Making Decisions and Forming Judgments
The Belief Perseverance Phenomenon
• Belief perseverance
–Consider the
opposite
Making Decisions and Forming Judgments
The Perils and Powers of Intuition
• Intuition
–Unconscious intuition
Making Decisions and Forming Judgments
The Effects of Framing
• Framing
– The Economist example
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Language
Language
Introduction
• Language
Language Structure
Phonemes
• Phoneme
–English about 40 phonemes
• 11 in Rotokas (Papua New Guinea) and
12 in Hawaiian
• 141 in !Xu~ (southern Africa, in the
Kalahari desert)
–Learning another language’s
phonemes
Language Structure
Morphemes
• Morpheme
–Includes prefixes and suffixes
Language Structure
Grammar
• Grammar
–Semantics
–Syntax
Language Development
When Do We Learn Language?
• Receptive language
• Productive language
–Babbling stage
–One-word stage
–Two-word stage
–Telegraphic speech
Language Development
When Do We Learn Language?
Language Development
When Do We Learn Language?
Language Development
When Do We Learn Language?
Language Development
When Do We Learn Language?
Language Development
When Do We Learn Language?
Language Development
When Do We Learn Language?
Language Development
Explaining Language Development
• Skinner: Operant Learning
–Learning principles
• Association
• Imitation
• Reinforcement
Language Development
Explaining Language Development
• Chomsky: Inborn Universal Grammar
–Overgeneralization of language
–Language acquisition device
–Universal grammar
Noam Chomsky &
Ali G Interview (1:56)
Language Development
Explaining Language Development
• Statistical Learning and Critical
Periods
–Statistical learning
• Ex. United Nations as
“Uneye Tednay Shuns”
–Critical (sensitive) period
Thinking and Language
Language Influences Thinking
• Whorf’s linguistic determinism
• Bilingual advantage
Thinking in Images
• fMRI imagining pain
• Liu Chi Kung piano
example
• UCLA
undergraduate
student experiment
– Process Simulation >
Outcome Simulation
Definition
Slides
Cognition
= the mental activities associated with
thinking, knowing, remembering, and
communicating.
Concept
= a mental grouping of similar objects,
events, ideas, or people.
Prototype
= a mental image or best example of a
category. Matching new items to a
prototype provides a quick and easy
method for sorting items into categories
(as when comparing feathered creatures
to a prototypical bird, such as a robin).
Algorithm
= a methodical, logical rule or procedure that
guarantees solving a particular problem.
Contrasts with the usually speedier – but
also more error-prone – use of heuristics.
Heuristic
= a simple thinking strategy that often allows
us to make judgments and solve problems
efficiently; usually speedier but also more
error-prone than algorithms.
Ex. SPLOYOCHYG
- 907,200 possibilities
Insight
= a sudden and often novel realization of the
solution to a problem; it contrasts with
strategy-based solutions.
Ex. Think of a word that will form a
compound word or phrase with each of the
following three words:
pine, crab, sauce
Creativity
= the ability to produce novel and valuable
ideas.
Confirmation Bias
= a tendency to search for information that
supports our preconceptions and to ignore
or distort contradictory evidence.
“2-4-6” Sequence
Fixation
= the inability to see a problem from a new
perspective, by employing a different
mental set.
Mental Set
= a tendency to approach a problem in one
particular way, often a way that has been
successful in the past.
Functional Fixedness
= the tendency to think of things only in
terms of their usual functions; an
impediment to problem solving.
MacGyver (4:49)
Representativeness Heuristic
= judging the likelihood of things in terms of
how well they seem to represent, or
match, particular prototypes; may lead us
to ignore other relevant information.
Representativeness Heuristic
Linda is 31, single, outspoken, and very
bright. She majored in philosophy in
college. As a student, she was deeply
concerned with discrimination and other
social issues, and she participated in
antinuclear demonstrations. Which
statement is more likely?
1. Linda is a bank teller.
2. Linda is a bank teller and active in
the feminist movement.
Representativeness Heuristic
A stranger tells you about a person who is
short, slim, and likes to read poetry, and
then asks you to guess whether this
person is more likely to be a professor of
classics at an Ivy League University or a
truck driver. Which would be a better
guess?
Availability Heuristic
= estimating the likelihood of events based
on their availability in memory; if instances
come readily to mind (perhaps because of
their vividness), we presume such events
are common
Ex. Letter K, terrorist attack
Overconfidence
= the tendency to be more confident than
correct – to over-estimate the accuracy of
our beliefs and judgments.
Belief Perseverance
= clinging to one’s
initial conceptions
after the basis on
which they are
formed has been
discredited.
Intuition
= an effortless, immediate, automatic feeling
or thought, as contrasted with explicit,
conscious reasoning.
Framing
= the way an issue is posed; how an issue is
framed can significantly affect decisions
and judgments.
Language
= our spoken, written, or signed words and
the ways we combine them to
communicate meaning.
Phoneme
= in language, the smallest distinctive sound
unit.
Morpheme
= in a language, the smallest unit that
carries meaning; may be a word or a part
of a word (such as a prefix).
Grammar
= in a language, a system of rules that
enables us to communicate with and
understand others.
Semantics
= the set of rules by which we derive
meaning from morphemes, words, and
sentences in a given language; also, the
study of meaning.
Syntax
= the rules for combining words into
grammatically sensible sentences in a
given language.
Babbling Stage
= beginning at about 4 months, the stage of
speech development in which the infant
spontaneously utters various sounds at
first unrelated to the household language.
One-word Stage
= the stage in speech development, from
about age 1 to 2, during which a child
speaks mostly in single words.
Two-word Stage
= beginning about age 2, the stage in
speech development during which a child
speaks mostly two-word statements.
Telegraphic Speech
= early speech state in which a child speaks
like a telegram – “go car” – using mostly
nouns and verbs.
Linguistic Determinism
= Whorf’s hypothesis that language
determines the way we think.