Thinking, Language, and Intelligence

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Thinking, Language, and Intelligence
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Cognitive Psychology
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Cognitive Psychology

• study of mental processes by which people process
  and remember info, develop language, solve
  problems, and think.

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• Cognition - Mental activities involved in
  acquiring, retaining, and using knowledge

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• Thinking the manipulation of mental symbols in
  order to draw inferences and conclusions

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Shoe Repair

• Jerri repairs shoes for a local shoe store.
  Currently, she has four pairs, each from a
  different customer, all of which need some work
  done on them. Can you link up each person with
  the color and type of shoe that he or she owns
  and the type of repair that Jerri is doing?

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• 1. The sandals have worn soles that need
  replacing.
• 2. Lenore owns the pumps, which arent brown.
• 3. Dwayne owns the maroon shoes
• 4. Marias shoes have either a broken heel or a
  split instep.
• 5. A man owns the loafers.
• 6. The shoes that have a hole in the toe (which
  arent Ralphs and arent the pumps).
• 7. the boots are tan.
• 8. The black shoes dont have a split instep.

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• Mental Image mental representation of objects
  or events that are not physically present

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Using Imagery
Rotate pairs of images of the patterns to the
left in your mind to make them match. Do the
drawings in each pair represent the same object,
or are they different objects?
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• Concepts - Mental categories we have formed to
  group objects, events, or situations that share
  similar features or characteristics.

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• concept a mental grouping of similar objects,
  events, ideas, or people
• Acquired though everyday experiences and usually
  have fuzzy boundaries

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• Formal Concept - Mental category formed by
  learning the rules or features that define it.

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• Prototype - The best or most typical, instance
  of a particular concept

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Story problem

• An old money-lender offered to cancel a
  merchants debt and keep him from going to prison
  if the merchant would give the money-lender his
  lovely daughter. Horrified yet desperate, the
  merchant and his daughter agreed to let
  Providence decide. The money-lender said he would
  put a black pebble and a white pebble in a bag
  and the girl would draw one. The white pebble
  would cancel the debt and leave her free. The
  black one would make her the money-lenders,
  although the debt would be canceled. If she
  refused to pick, her father would go to prison.
  From the pebble-strewn path they were standing
  on, the money-lender picked two pebbles and
  quickly put them in the bag, but the girl saw he
  had picked up two black ones. What would you
  have done if you were the girl to play the
  money-lenders game and win.

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Kinds of Thinking
People think in several ways ?

• Directed thinking is a systematic and logical
  attempt to reach a specific goal, such as the
  solution to a problem. ?
• Nondirected thinking (or divergent thinking),
  consists of a free flow of thoughts with no
  particular plan and depends more on images. ?

A third type of thinking is metacognition, or
thinking about thinking.
metacognition the awareness of ones own
cognitive process
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Deductive Reasoning

• Reasoning from the general to the specific, or
  drawing particular conclusions from general
  principles
• In deductive reasoning, the conclusion is true if
  the premises are true.
• A premise is an idea or statement that provides
  the basic info that allows us to draw conclusions

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Algorithms

• a step-by-step procedure to solve a problem that
  always results in the correct answer
• EX formula for area of a circle
• Not always practical for solving problems

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Inductive Reasoning

• Reason from individual cases or particular facts
  to reach a general conclusion
• More simply, induction is what you do when you
  arrive at a conclusion on the basis of some
  evidence EX detective work

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Heuristic

• a general rule of thumb to reduce the number of
  possible solutions to a problem

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Availability Heuristic

• strategy in which the likelihood of an event is
  estimated on the basis of how readily available
  other instances of the event are in memory.

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Representative Heuristics

• Strategy in which the likelihood of an event is
  estimated by comparing how similar it is to our
  prototype of the event.
• Ex. If I meet someone with a laid back attitude
  and long hair, I might assume they are
  Californian, where as someone who is very polite
  but rigid may be assumed English.

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Trial and Error

• Involves trying something, and if that doesnt
  work trying something else until you solve the
  problem
• Useful if there are a limited number of possible
  solutions

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Difference Reduction

• Problem-solving method that involves reducing the
  difference between the present situation and the
  desired one

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Analogies

• An analogy is a similarity between two or more
  items, events or situations.
• Ex. If you observe that you do well on a test
  for one class, you may try that technique again
  next time you have a test, even if the next test
  is in a different class.

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Working Backward

• In working backward, however, the problem solver
  starts by examining the final goal, then works
  back from the final goal to the present position
  to determine the best course of action.

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• Imagine that you are a doctor. One of your
  patients has a stomach tumor that must be
  destroyed if the patient is to live. Certain
  rays will destroy the tumor if they are intense
  enough. To reach the tumor, however, the rays
  need to pass through the healthy tissue that
  surrounds it, and at the intensity needed to
  destroy the tumor, the rays will also destroy the
  healthy tissue. How can you use the rays to
  destroy the tumor without damaging the healthy
  tissue?

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Insight

• When we suddenly realize the solution to a
  problem
• Rarely works without a lot of previous effort

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Incubation effect

• When we arrive at the solution to a problem when
  we have not even been consciously working on the
  problem.

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Fixation

• The inability to see a problem from a new
  perspective and impediment to problem solving

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Matchstick Problem

• How would you arrange six matches to form four
  equilateral triangles.

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• To solve this problem you must break the fixation
  of limiting your considerations to
  two-dimensional solutions.

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Mental Set

• tendency to respond to a new problem with an
  approach that was successfully used with similar
  problems.

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Functional Fixedness

• tendency to think of an object as being useful
  only for the function that the object is usually
  used for.

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Creativity and Problem Solving

• Convergent Thinking thought is limited to
  available facts, and one tries to narrow ones
  thinking to find the single best solution
• Divergent Thinking one associates more freely
  to the various elements of a problem. One
  follows leads that run in various directions
  perhaps one of them will lead to the solution
  unexpectedly. Thinking outside the box

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Connect the dots with four straight lines without
lifting your pencil from the paper

• . . .
• . . .
• . . .

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Language

• the communication of ideas through symbols that
  are arranged according to rules of grammar

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Basic Elements of Language

• Phonemes - basic sounds of language
• In a spoken language, the smallest distinctive
  sound.
• Morphemes basic units of meaning
• In a language, the smallest unit that carries
  meaning may be a word or a part of a word
• Syntax - way in which words are arranged to make
  phrases and sentences

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Semantics

• A set of rules by which we derive meaning from
  words, the study of meaning

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Stages of Language Development

• Crying, Cooing, and Babbling - not considered
  true language because they do not use symbols
  with specific meanings. However, it is effective
  at getting attention of caregivers.

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• 2. Words, Words, Words the beginning of true
  language, kids start to use words. Mostly nouns,
• Often they extend the meanings of words to refer
  to things for which they do not have words. This
  behavior is called overextension

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• 3. Development of Grammar - The first things
  children say are usually brief, but they have the
  meanings of sentences. That is, these utterances
  have a grammar.
• Even one word can express a complete thought,
  such as Sit!
• As they approach their second birthday, most
  children begin to use two-word sentences.

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How Do We Learn Language?

• Hereditary Influences
• Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
• Noam Chomsky among other psychologist believe
  that people have a natural tendency to acquire
  language. Chomsky refers to this tendency as
  Language Acquisition Device, Humans have it
  animals do not.

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• Environmental Influences - Learning theorists
  claim that language learning is similar to other
  forms of learned behavior. Children learn
  language, at least in part, by observing and
  imitating other people.

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• Bilingualism speaking two languages
• Many people throughout the world speak two or
  more languages
• Today most psychologists believe that it is good
  for childrens cognitive development to be
  bilingual.

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Thinking without language

• Ex. Turn on the hot water
• Thinking in images
• If I have a big box with three boxes inside of
  that one box then three boxes in each of those
  three boxes and three boxes in each of those
  boxes how many total boxes are there.

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Animals and language

• Can animals really use language?

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Charles Spearman

• Believed that intelligence is composed of a
  general ability, which is responsible for
  performance on tests of intelligence and ability.

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Howard Gardner

• Believes that mental abilities are independent of
  one another and can not be defined by one single
  measure but by Multiple intelligences, which are
  all equally important

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Alfred Binet (1857-1911)

• Realized brighter children performed like older
  children

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• Mental age- Childs current ability compared to
  other children of different ages
• Chronological age- numeric age

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Other Intelligence tests

• WAIS- Designed for adults
• Achievement Tests- ex TAKS
• Aptitude tests- ex. SAT, ACT, or GRE

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Components of a Good Test

• Standardization- test must be given to a large
  number of subjects that are representative of the
  group under uniform conditions.
• Reliability- gives the same results over and over
  again
• Validity- testing whether or not a test measures
  what it is intended to measure

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