Thinking and Language
Unit VII Modules 34-36
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrSUe_m
19FY
Link Chain Puzzle
“You are given four separate pieces of chain that are
each three links in length. It costs 2¢ to open a link and
3¢ to close a link. All links are closed at the beginning
of the problem. Your goal is to join all 12 links of chain
into a single circle at a cost of no more than 15¢.”
Luchins Water Jug Puzzle
• Can you make 4 equilateral triangles with the
six pencils provided?
Thinking and concepts
• We as humans fear the wrong things
• We allow the day’s hot or cold weather to
color our judgments of global climate change
• We tend to be overconfident in our judgments
and to persevere in clinging to discredited
beliefs *
Thinking and concepts
• Cognition- all the mental activities associated
with thinking, knowing, remembering, and
communicating
• Concepts- a mental grouping of similar
objects, events, ideas, or people
• You may have a concept for chairs- they are all
things used for sitting
• Concepts simplify our thinking *
Thinking and concepts
• Without concepts, we would need a different
name for every person, event, object, and idea
• We could not just simply say, “They are angry.”
• There would be no concept for angry
• We would have to describe expressions,
intensities, and words instead of using the
concept of angry
• Concepts such as anger give us information
with little cognitive effort *
• Create a chart for the concepts of animals and
plants.
Thinking and concepts
• We often form our concepts by developing
prototypes
– 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
• People more quickly agree that a robin is a bird
than that a penguin is a bird
• Robins more closely match our prototype of a
concept *
• What would be your prototype for the
following things:
– Car
– Hero
– Villain
– Color
– Woman
– Man
Thinking and concepts
• The more something matches our prototype of a
concept the more readily we recognize it as an
example of the concept
• Move away from our prototypes, and category
boundaries may blur
– Is a tomato a fruit?
– Is a 17 year old female a girl or a woman?
– Is a whale a fish or a mammal?
• Concepts speed and guide our thinking, but they
don’t always make us wise *
Creativity
• Creativity- the ability to produce novel and
valuable ideas
• Studies suggest that a certain level of
aptitude- a score above 120 on a standard
intelligence test- support creativity
• Intelligence matters in creativity but there is
more to creativity than what intelligence tests
reveal *
Creativity
• There are two different kinds of thinking that
engage different parts of the brain
• Intelligence tests that usually demand a single
correct answer, require convergent thinking
– Narrows the available problem solutions to
determine the single best solution
• Injury to the left parietal lobe damages our
ability to use convergent thinking *
Creativity
• Creativity tests require divergent thinking
– Expands the number of possible problem
solutions
– How many uses can you think of for a brick?
• Injury to certain areas of the frontal lobes can
leave reading, writing, and arithmetic skills
intact but destroy imagination *
Creativity
• There is no Creativity Quotient that
corresponds to an Intelligence Quotient score
• Robert Sternberg has identified five
components of creativity
– Expertise, imaginative thinking skills, a
venturesome personality, intrinsic motivation, and
a creative environment *
Creativity
• Expertise- a well developed base of knowledge
– Provides the ideas, images, and phrases we use as
mental building blocks
• Imaginative thinking skills- provides the ability to
see things in novel ways, to recognize patterns,
and to make connections
• A venturesome personality- seeks new
experiences, tolerates ambiguity and risk, and
perseveres in overcoming obstacles *
Creativity
• Intrinsic motivation- being driven more by
interest, satisfaction, and challenge than by
external pressures
• A creative environment- sparks, supports, and
refines creative ideas *
Creativity
• For those seeking to boost the creative
process try these:
– Develop your expertise, allow time for incubation,
set aside time for the mind to roam freely, and
experience other cultures and ways of thinking *
Problem solving: Strategies and
obstacles
• Humans have a problem solving ability when
facing a dilemma
• Some problems we solve through trial and
error
• We can also use algorithms
– A methodical, logical rule or procedure that
guarantees solving a particular problem
– Contrasts with the usually speedier but also more
error-prone heuristics *
Problem solving: Strategies and
obstacles
• Heuristics- a simple thinking strategy that often allows
us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently
• Algorithms are a step by step process and are tiring and
mentally draining
• To find a word using the 10 letters in SPLOYOCHYG, you
could try each letter in each of the 10 positions907,200 ways in all
• With heuristics you might reduce the number of
options by grouping letters that often appear together
and excluding rare letter combinations
• By using heuristics and then applying trial and error,
you may hit on the answer
• What is the word? *
Problem solving: Strategies and
obstacles
• Sometimes no problem solving strategy seems
to be at work at all and we arrive at a solution
to a problem with insight
– A sudden realization of a problem’s solution;
contrasts with strategy based solutions
• Wolfgang Kohler conducted studies to see if
humans were the only ones to experience
insight *
Problem solving: Strategies and
obstacles
• Kohler’s experiments on insight
– Conducted his experiments with Sultan, the chimp
– He would place a piece of fruit and a long stick outside
sultan’s cage
– Inside the cage he placed a short stick which Sultan
grabbed, using it to try to reach the fruit
– After several failed attempts, he dropped the stick and
seemed to survey the situation
– Then suddenly Sultan jumped up and seized the short stick
again
– He used it to pull in the longer stick which he then used to
reach the fruit
– The chimps even started to store a tool they could use the
next day to retrieve the food *
Problem solving: Strategies and
obstacles
• Insight strikes with no prior sense of getting
warmer or feeling close to a solution
• We experience an Aha moment *
Problem solving: Strategies and
obstacles
• Some cognitive tendencies may lead us astray
when trying to find a solution to a problem
• We more eagerly seek out and favor evidence
verifying our ideas than evidence refuting
them
• Confirmation bias- a tendency to search for
information that supports our preconceptions
and to ignore or distort contradictory
evidence *
Problem solving: Strategies and
obstacles
• Once people form a belief they prefer belief
confirming information
• Once we incorrectly represent a problem, its
hard to restructure how we approach it
• If the matchstick(pencil) problem was difficult
for you, you may be experiencing fixation
– An inability to see a problem from a fresh
perspective *
Problem solving: Strategies and
obstacles
• A prime example of fixation is mental set
– A tendency to approach a problem in one
particular way, often a way that has been
successful in the past
• Often times solutions that worked in the past
do work in the future
• If they do not work we make excuses of why it
did not work
• This is an example of confirmation bias *
Problem solving: Strategies and
obstacles
• Given the sequence O-T-T-F-?-?-? What are
the final three letters?
• The answer is F-S-S
• Given the sequence J-F-M-A-?-?-? What are
the next three letters?
• The answer is M-J-J
• Why was the second one easier? *
Forming Good and Bad decisions and
judgments
• We seldom take the time to reason systematically
when making decisions throughout the day
• We follow our intuition
– An effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or
thought, as contrasted with explicit, conscious
reasoning
• When we need to act quickly, the mental
shortcuts we call heuristics enable snap
judgments
• Thanks to our mind’s automatic information
processing, intuitive judgments are instantaneous
and usually effective *
Forming Good and Bad decisions and
judgments
• Representativeness and availability heuristics can often
lead the smartest people into dumb decisions
• 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
relevant information
• They influence many of our daily decisions
• To judge the likelihood of something, we intuitively
compare it with our mental representation of the
category
• If the two match, that fact usually overrides other
considerations of statistics or logic *
Forming Good and Bad decisions and
judgments
• Availability heuristic- estimating the likelihood
of events based on their availability in
memory
– If instances come readily to mind, we presume
such events are common
• Casinos entice us to gamble by signaling even
small wins with bells and lights while keeping
big losses soundlessly invisible *
Forming Good and Bad decisions and
judgments
• Availability heuristics can lead us astray when
judging other people
• Anything that makes information pop into mind
can make it seem commonplace
• If someone from a particular ethnic or religious
group commits a terrorist act, our readily
available memory of the dramatic event may
shape our impressions of the whole group
• This occurred after 9/11 *
Forming Good and Bad decisions and
judgments
• We often fear the wrong things
• We fear flying because we often play in our heads
some air disaster
• We fear letting our children walk to school
because we play in our heads tapes of abducted
and brutalized children
• Even just passing by a person who sneezes and
coughs heightens our perceptions of various
health risks
• We come to fear extremely rare events *
Forming Good and Bad decisions and
judgments
• Sometimes our judgments and decisions go
awry because we are more confident that
correct
• People overestimate their performance
• Overconfidence- the tendency to be more
confident than correct- to overestimate the
accuracy of our beliefs and judgments *
Forming Good and Bad decisions and
judgments
• Anticipating how much we will accomplish, we
overestimate our future leisure time
• Believing we will have more time next month
than we do today, we happily accept invitations
and assignments, only to discover we’re just as
busy when the day rolls around
• We take out loans or buy on credit because we
believe we will have more money next year
• Despite our painful underestimates, we remain
overly confident of our next prediction *
Forming Good and Bad decisions and
judgments
• Belief perseverance- clinging to one’s initial
conceptions after the basis on which they
were formed has been discredited
• It often fuels social conflict
• To help guard against this, consider the
opposite
• The more we come to appreciate why our
beliefs may be true, the more tightly we cling
to them *
Forming Good and Bad decisions and
judgments
• Framing- the way an issue is posed
– How an issue is framed can significantly affect
decisions and judgments
• the surgeon example
– One tells patients that 10 percent of people die during
this surgery
– The other tells patients that 90 percent will survive
– The information is the same but the effect is not
– In surveys, both patients and physicians said the risk
seems greater when they hear that 10 percent will die
*
Forming Good and Bad decisions and
judgments
• Examples of how intuition can be good, pg.
369
Language
• Language- our spoken, written, or signed
words and the ways we combine them to
communicate meaning
• Thanks to language, information can move
from my mind to yours
• Thanks to language, we comprehend much
that we’ve never seen and that our distant
ancestors never knew *
Language
• There are three building blocks to language
• Phonemes- in a language, the smallest distinctive
sound unit
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
To say bat, English speakers utter the phonemes b, a, and t
Phonemes are not the same as letters
Chat has three phonemes, ch, a, and t
There have been 869 different phonemes discovered in
human speech around the world
No language uses all of them
English uses about 40
Consonant phonemes carry more information do vowel
phonemes
The treth of thes stetement shed be evedent frem thes
bref demenstretien *
Language
• Morphemes- in a language, the smallest unit
that carries meaning
– May be a word or a part of a word
– Some morphemes are also phonemes- I and the s
that indicates plural
– Most morphemes combine two or more
phonemes
– Bat, gentle, pre in preview, or ed in adapted are all
morphemes *
Language
• Grammar- a system of rules that enables us to
communicate with and understand others
– semantics is the set of rules for deriving meaning
from sounds
– syntax is the set of rules for combining words into
grammatically sensible sentences *
Language
• In English, 40 phonemes can be combined to
form more than 100,000 morphemes, which
alone or in combination produce the 616,500
word forms in the Oxford English Dictionary
• Using those words, we can then created an
infinite number of sentences, most of which
are original *
Language Development
• You will have learned 60,000 words in your native
language during the years between your first
birthday and your high school graduation
• That averages to 10 a day
• You will use 150 words for about half of what you
say during that time
• We seldom form sentences in our minds before
speaking them, instead we organize them on the
fly as we speak *
Language Development
• Infants start without language
• By 4 months they can recognize differences in
speech sounds
• They can read lips
• This marks the beginning of the development
of receptive language
– Their ability to understand what is said to and
about them *
Language Development
• At 7 months and beyond, babies grow in their
power to segment spoken sounds into
individual words
• Productive language is their ability to produce
words, and it matures after their receptive
language
• They recognize noun-verb differences earlier
than they utter sentences with nouns and
verbs *
Language Development
• Before nurture molds babies’ speech, nature enables a
wide range of possible sounds in the babbling stage
• 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
• Many of these spontaneously uttered sounds are
consonant-vowel pairs formed by simply bunching the
tongue in the front of the mouth(da-da) or by opening
and closing the lips(ma-ma)
• Da-da using is easier to say than ma-ma *
Language Development
• Babbling is not an imitation of adult speech
• From this early babbling, a listener could not
identify an infant as being, French, Korean, or
Ethiopian
• Deaf infants who observe their deaf parents
signing begin to babble more with their hands
• By the time infants are about 10 months old,
their babbling has changed so that a trained
ear can identify the household language *
Language Development
• Without exposure to other languages, babies
lose their ability to hear and produce sounds
and tones found outside their native language
• By adulthood, those who speak only English
cannot discriminate certain sounds in
Japanese speech *
Language Development
• Around their first birthday, most children
enter the one word stage
• The stage in speech development, from about
age 1 to 2, during which a child speaks mostly
in single words
• They have already learned that sounds carry
meanings, and if repeatedly trained to
associate a word with a picture, they will look
at the picture when they hear the word *
Language Development
• They now begin to use sounds, usually only
one barely recognizable syllable such as ma or
da, to communicate meaning
• Across the world, baby’s first words are often
nouns that label objects or people
• At this one word stage, a single inflected word
like doggy may equal a sentence *
Language Development
• At about 18 months, children’s word learning
explodes from about a word per week to a
word per day
• By their second birthday, most have entered
the two-word stage
– the stage in speech development during which a
child speaks mostly in two word statements *
Language Development
• The children will start to utter two word
sentences in telegraphic speech
• Telegraphic speech- early speech stage in which a
child speaks like a telegram- go car- mostly nouns
and verbs
• Telegraphic speech follows rules of syntax
because the words are in sensible order
• In English speakers, adjectives will usually be
placed before nouns- white house
• Spanish speakers, the order will be reversed, casa
blanca *
Language Development
• If children get a late start on learning a particular
language, such as after receiving a cochlear
implant or being adopted by a family in another
country, their language development still
proceeds through the same sequence, its just at a
faster pace
• By early elementary school, children understand
complex sentences and begin to enjoy the humor
conveyed by double meanings: “You never starve
in the desert because of all the sand-which-is
there” *
Language Development
• Noam Chomsky argued that all languages while
different, do share some basic elements, which
he called universal grammar
• All human languages have nouns, verbs, and
adjectives as grammatical building blocks
• Chomsky believed humans are born with a built
in predisposition to learn grammar rules, which
helps explain why preschoolers pick up language
so readily and use grammar so well
• Chomsky believed it happens so naturally that
training hardly helps *
Language Development
• Chomksy did not believe we are born with a
built in specific language
• He believed anyone could learn any language
• Whatever language we experience as children,
whether spoken or signed, we all readily learn
its specific grammar and vocabulary
• No matter what language we learn, we start
speaking it mostly in nouns rather than verbs
and adjectives *
Language Development
• According to many researchers, childhood seems
to represent a critical period for mastering certain
aspects of language before the language learning
window closes
• People who learn a second language as adults
usually speak it with the accent of their native
language and they have difficulty mastering the
new grammar
• Age 7 is considered to be the time when the
language window begins to shut *
Language Development
• Those who have not been exposed to either a
spoken or a signed language gradually lose
their ability to master any language at all
starting at age 7 *
The Brain and Language
• Aphasia- impairment of language, usually
caused by left hemisphere damage either to
Broca’s area or to Wernicke’s area
• Aphasia can lead to people being able to
speak but not read, read but not speak, write
but not read, read but not write, or read
numbers but not letters *
The Brain and Language
• Broca’s area- controls language expression- an
area of frontal lobe, usually in the left
hemisphere, that directs the muscle movements
involved in speech
– Would struggle to speak words while still being able to
sing familiar songs and comprehend speech
• Wernicke’s area- controls language reception- a
brain area involved in language comprehension
and expression; usually in the left temporal lobe
– People could speak only meaningless words *
Language and thought
• Benjamin Lee Whorf contended that language
determines the way we think
• Linguistic determinism- Whorf’s hypothesis
that language determines the way we think
• It is believed his hypothesis is too extreme
• We all think about things for which we have
no words
• It has been found that maybe a person may
think differently in different languages *
Language and thought
• For example, English has a rich vocabulary for
self-focused emotions such as anger while
Japanese has more words for interpersonal
emotions such as sympathy
• So our words may not determine what we
think, but they do influence our thinking *
Additional terms to know
• Artificial intelligence- the intelligence exhibited by machines or
software
• Functional fixedness- When something is thought of only in terms
of its functionality, then the person is demonstrating functional
fixedness. This type of thinking is narrow and limited, often
inhibiting the problem solving process.
• Types of concepts:
– Relational- looks at the connection between objects or ideas and often
involves an act of comparison. Example: If someone leaves you a
small tip after waiting on their table you may call them a “cheapskate”
– Conjunctive- an idea that is explained by a group of traits, for which
each participant is required to be present for the idea to be applicable.
Example: to be classified as a mother, both the trait of female and
parent must be present.
– Disjunctive- A concept based on the set of attributes that are not
needed in every instance. Example: a car can still be considered a car
even without on of the traits of a car being present
Additional terms to know
• General solution- a solution to a differential equation that contains
arbitrary, unevaluated constants.
• Deductive reasoning- happens when a researcher works from the
more general information to the more specific.
– Sometimes this is called the “top-down” approach because the
researcher starts at the top with a very broad spectrum of information
and they work their way down to a specific conclusion.
• Inductive reasoning- works the opposite way, moving from specific
observations to broader generalizations and theories.
– sometimes called a “bottom up” approach.
– The researcher begins with specific observations and measures, begins
to then detect patterns and regularities, formulate some tentative
hypotheses to explore, and finally ends up developing some general
conclusions or theories.
Additional terms to know
• What determines if a language is an actual
language? It contains grammar and syntax
• Overgeneralization- In linguistics, the
application of a grammatical rule in cases
where it doesn't apply.
– For example, a young child may say "foots"
instead of "feet,"