AP PSYCH UNIT 4 MODS 29-33

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AP PSYCH UNIT 4MODS 29-33
Thinking, Language, Intelligence
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AP Unit 4 (mods 29-33) Thinking, language, and
intelligence

• Thinkingcognition consists of
• processing
• understanding
• remembering
• communicating
• Neuropsychologists are concerned with cellular
  processes of transduction, neural communication,
  functions of different regions of the brain
  related to cognition at both unconscious and
  conscious levels
• Cognitive psychologists are concerned with
• how ones brain juggles past experience, present,
  and future possibilities
• how people file or process new information and
  retrieve it later
• how people problem solve
• how people communicate and use language to think

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Developmental Cognitive Theories Piaget

• children develop schemas (like a sorting/filing
  system in the braineach folder has a set of
  rules for organizing and interacting with sensory
  stimuli) by
• exploring, manipulating objects, listening,
  observing, tasting, etc
• assimilating (filing new concepts and objects
  into existing schema) and
• accommodating (making changes to schema to
  assimilate things that dont quite fit existing
  schema developing subsets of categories within
  hierarchies)

abstract, able to test hypothesis
Able to manipulate symbols, perform basic
observations, principle of conservation emerges
starting to learn symbols, very egocentric view
of world
all learning enters via sensory stimuli lack
object permanence until about 8 mo.
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New findings challenge some of Piagets theory

• Sensorimotor stage
• Piaget asserted babies have no concept of object
  permanence until 8 mo.
• New studies of brain show even younger babies may
  notice something has been hidden
• Karen Wynns experiments upend Piaget by showing
  even infants have concepts of math show surprise
  and longer attention when math rules violated

• Preoperational stage
• Piaget asserts thinking is egocentric YET candles
  in the crayon box experiment (AKA false belief
  test click for video) demonstrates children
  develop theory of mind by age 4
• Alison Gopniks study Goldfish or broccoli?
  shows even babies may have a theory of mind! (see
  video snippet) start _at_ 140
• DeLoache study shows complex symbolic thinking by
  age 3 (a couple years earlier than Piaget would
  have thought) when kids able to pass hidden
  object in model room test
• Formal operational
• New studies indicate even young children (thought
  to be preoperational) engage in testing
  hypotheses See video snippet of Alison Gopniks
  work (start _at_ 10 min)

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Prototypes

• Prototypesschema mental representations into
  which we file like concepts, objects
• Corneille ethnically mixed faces study
  demonstrates how people shift their memories to
  fit preexisting prototypes
• e.g. shown an image of a photo-shopped Caucasian
  man that has been 30 blended with a Japanese
  man, a person will place the image in a Caucasian
  prototype and later remember the image as more
  Caucasian than it really was

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How do people solve problems?

• Trial and error
• Algorithms step-by-step solution
• flaw time consuming, laborious
• Heuristics solving problems via short-cuts due
  to past learnings
• flaw often inaccurate!
• Tversky Kahneman (1974) identified 2 kinds of
  flawed thinking representativeness and
  availability heuristics
• Insight Ah ah! moments
• Jung-Beeman, Kounnious, Bowden have studied fMRIs
  of people to determine insight takes place in
  right temporal lobe

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Why is our reasoning so often flawed?

• Confirmation Bias The Fox News vs. CNN rule
• People tune out information that does not
  coincide with their own beliefs and seek out
  information that confirms they are right
• Functional fixation
• People find it hard to think outside of the box.
  We are used to an object being used in a certain
  way (having a specific function) that we fail to
  see other uses of the object
• e.g. I really need a paper clip to fasten some
  papers together. I only have a hair pin. I do not
  see how hair pin could do same thing because my
  brain assigns hair pin only one functionholding
  back hair
• Mental set
• We fixate on solutions that have worked for us in
  the past and are unable to approach problems in
  novel ways

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Why is our reasoning so often flawed?

• Representativeness heuristic
• causes us to fail to consider statistical and
  other relevant information
• we rely on our prototypes based on past
  experience to judge the likelihood of something
• See video snippet how media creates biased
  representativeness heuristic for criminals and
  terrorists
• Availability heuristic
• We falsely judge the likelihood of an event as
  more likely IF that kind of event is easily
  recalled by memory
• often tied to emotionally vivid events
• e.g. Person may believe likelihood of being
  attacked by a shark while in ocean is very high
  because news keeps showing stories about it
  happening person is ignoring fact that millions
  of others swam in ocean that day that were NOT
  attacked by a shark!

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Why is our reasoning so often flawed? New science
of neuroeconomics (behavioral economics)

• Anchoring heuristic, present bias, fear of losing
  video snippet (start at 1230)
• Framing matters (Glass half full or empty?)
• We interpret the meaning of exact same data
  differently, depending upon how it is framed
• When deciding whether or not to take a prescribed
  medication, which would you rather hear?
• 10 of people taking the medicine experience
  severe discomfort
• 90 of the people taking the medicine experience
  no side effects
• Would you be more likely to buy a skirt for 100
  thats been marked down from 150 or a skirt for
  100?
• Would you be more likely to buy the 50
  microwave, the 150 microwave, or the 500
  microwave if they are all sitting right net to
  each other on the shelf?

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Why is our reasoning so often flawed?

• Overconfidence
• Kahneman and Tversky (1979) quiz
• Answers
• 1. 3.6 million sq miles
• 2. 19.7 million
• 3. 385 deaths
• 4. 219,000 female engineers
• 5. 441 nuclear plants
• Leads us to stubbornly insist we are right and
  fail to investigate alternative possibilities
• Leads us to underestimate the difficulty or
  amount of time a task will take/overestimate our
  own abilities

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Why is our reasoning so often flawed? (note how
these next 2 are similar to overconfidence and
confirmation bias)

• Belief biasour own opinions are clearly more
  logical!
• We are more likely to see the flaws of an
  argument or statement that disagrees with our own
  beliefs and less likely to see flaws of an
  argument that concurs with our beliefs
• Belief perseverance
• We ignore evidence and arguments that go against
  our beliefs and in fact become more steadfast in
  our opinion when presented with arguments against
  it

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Language How humans get meaning from sounds
_______ the rules for the order of words a
sentence within
___________ most basic sounds including
consonant blends, vowel blends e.g. bl, e, st,
oo English has 40
_____________ smallest unit of language that has
meaning includes prefixes, suffixes, words
__________ the rules for making morphemes
change their meaning (e.g. creating past tense)
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Simplified typical progression of human of
language acquisition

• Birth-3 months vocalization is created by crying
  and cooing
• 3 months-12 months babbling in progressively more
  refined ways
• random
• rhythmic
• imitation of mother tongue
• 12 months-18 months holophrastic stage receptive
  language improving
• 18 months-2 years telegraphic stage
• 2 years productive language improving
• overgeneralization/overregularization may appear
  from age 2-early elementary age
• adding ed to irregular verbs for past tense
  calling all 4 legged furry creatures dogs

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Simplified typical progression of human of
language acquisition (cont.)
Simplified typical progression of human of
language acquisition (cont.)
How many words and what kind?
what is most common body language/gesture?
How many words? a. 150 b. 300 c. 450 d.
more than 1,000
How many words now?
What is favorite (most used) word?

• About how many words now?
• approx. 2000
• about 3000
• about 5000

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Language Theories

• With which idea do you more agree for how/why
  people acquire language?
• We learn language through imitation and social
  reinforcement.
• We learn language due to an innate brain
  mechanism (AKA a language acquisition device)
  that once stimulated by the sound of others
  speech is designed to pick up grammar rules.
• Both A and B.

Behaviorist perspective Skinner, Watson
Noam Chomskys theory

• Provide an example to support Whorfs assertion,
  the linguistic relativity hypothesis, that
  language limits thinking.
• What other name is this theory given?
• linguistic determinism
• Statistical analysis studies

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Thinking in images

• brain image studies show that the same part of
  brain that is active when person DOING an
  activity is also active by merely imagining doing
  it or watching someone else do it
• visualization before a performance can enhance
  performance quality
• visualize the process that will get you there
  NOT the end goal/reward
• soccer coaching example

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What is going on in the brain when we speak or
listen to language?

• Video short brain imaging related to language
  (start at 100 stop at 543)
• Video short 2 noticing mistakes in language
  (start at 1250)

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What can we learn about language acquisition and
the nature or nurture question by studying deaf
children and other animals?

• window for cochlear implant begins to close at
  age 4 (oral speech quality diminishes)
• deaf children exposed to sign after age 2 show
  less activity in right hemisphere and less
  fluency than those exposed from birth
• deaf children babble with gestures
• academic achievement and intelligence test scores
  are higher for dear children exposed to sign at
  early age
• Chimps and gorillas have been taught to use
  communication boards with icons for words and
  sign language to communicate Kanzi demonstrating
  receptive language

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The Hart-Risley study (1995) The 30-million
word gap

• Longitudinal study of language exposure for
  children from birth to age 3 in 3 socioeconomic
  cohorts professional, working class, or poverty
• Findings?
• Huge difference in amount of words heard on a
  daily basis per hour
• professional families utter approx 2,100
  words/hour
• working class families1,200 words/hour
• welfare families620 words/hour
• So what?
• high correlation between vocabulary size at
  age three and language test scores at ages nine
  and ten in areas of vocabulary, listening,
  syntax, and reading comprehension. Question How
  does this relate to Whorfs linguistic
  determinism theory?

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Intelligence What is it, what shapes it, how is
it measured, and who cares?

• Discussion question What does it mean to be
  smart?
• crystallized vs. fluid intelligence Whats the
  difference and how does one acquire them?
• crystallized verbal skills and knowledge base
• fluid the speed of reasoning skills
• divergent vs. convergent thinking Which is more
  important or smarter?
• divergent creative, thinking outside the box,
  experimentation (Think Einstein trying to
  understand the nature of the universe and energy)
• convergent synthesizing and analyzing all
  available information to draw conclusions (Think
  Sherlock Homes trying to answer Who done it?)
• Intelligence tests, LSAT, GRE measure convergent
  thinking
• book smart vs. street smart
• emotional/social smart vs. ideas smart

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Intelligence What is it, what shapes it, how is
it measured, and who cares?

• Whats your IQ?
• 1 to 24 - Profound mental disability
• 25 to 39 - Severe mental disability
• 40 to 54 - Moderate mental disability
• 55 to 69 - Mild mental disability
• 70 to 84 - Borderline mental disability
• 85 to 114 - Average intelligence
• 115 to 129 - Above average bright
• 130 to 144 - Moderately gifted
• 145 to 159 - Highly gifted
• 160 to 179 - Exceptionally gifted (Genius level)
• 180 and up - Profoundly gifted

• Retardation score lower than 70 AND difficulty
  living independently
• 1 of population
• More boys than girls are mentally retarded
• Causes? Chromosomal abnormalities, brain
  injuries, exposure to toxins/teratogens

How do we come up with the numbers? 30-minute
VIDEO Understanding PsychologyTesting and
Intelligence
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How do we come up with IQ numbers?

• Alfred Binetgrandfather of intelligence testing
• mental agethe age that corresponds to level of
  cognitive performance on certain tasks
• e.g. an 8-year-old should be able to solve
  certain types of reasoning problems an
  8-year-old who surpasses this level of reasoning
  might have a mental age of 10 or 11 while an
  8-year-old who is unable to perform at this level
  might have mental age of 6 or 7
• How do we determine mental age?
• Devise problem solving/reasoning measurement
  tools to determine a persons mental age and how
  well he/she will do in school
• Anyone see any problems with this?
• Lewis Termanfather of the Stanford-Binet
  intelligence test
• WIlliam Stern designs formula to determine a
  persons intelligence in comparison to the
  general population at that age IQ (mental age/
  chronological age) 100

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More ways to come up with IQ numbers...

• Weschler testsmost widely used today to
  determine intelligence
• WAIS (for adults)
• WISC (ages 6-16)
• WPPSI (ages 4-6)
• Each Weschler test consists of subtests that
  reveal a persons mental abilities (via a
  deviation IQ score based on normal curve) in the
  following areas
• verbal comprehension
• perceptual organization
• working memory
• processing speed
• Today there are dozens of different IQ tests
  available

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How do we know a score has any value?

• Is the test standardized (questions deemed too
  easy or hard thrown out) and/or has it been
  restandardized (made harder to account for
  increases in scores)?
• Do the scores fall onto a normal curve of
  distribution? (For IQ, 1 standard of deviation is
  15 pointsthis means majority of population (68)
  tests between 85 and 115 on IQ tests)
• What was the purpose of the test?
• measuring fluid or crystallized intelligence?
• measuring achievement (mastery of knowledge or
  skill) or aptitude (ability to learn something
  new)?
• was it a speed test or a power test?

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How do we know a score has any value?
Consider this SAT and GRE have approx. .5 and
.3 predictive validity for success in college
and grad school

• Does the test have reliability?
• same test yields same results (test-retest,
  alternate- or equivalent-form, or split-half)
• Does the test have validity? Is it testing what
  it purports to be measuring?
• content (does it test all relevant content? e.g.
  if you were taking a test to see how much you
  have mastered all of the disciplines of
  psychology, it needs to test you on more than
  Freudian theory)
• face (is it measuring something that is relevant
  to what the score is trying to predict about the
  test taker?)
• criterion-related
• predictive (does the test accurately predict a
  persons future abilities in a career or academic
  studies?)
• concurrent (accurately measures what a person is
  like now)
• construct (high positive correlation between
  predictive results of one test and another that
  has already been proven accurate)

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Why is intelligence testing controversial?

• Danger or reifying IQ
• People see score on 1 test as defining a persons
  intelligence
• Possible cultural bias in tests
• People try to make correlation between race and
  IQ without considering socioeconomic factors
• stereotype threat studies demonstrate that black
  test takers and female test takers perform
  differently based on race/gender of test giver,
  race/gender of other test takers, expectations of
  how their race/gender will perform on the test
• Eugenicists used IQ scores and idea that IQ is
  heritable to justify sterilization of low IQ
  people
• Scores do not take into account different forms
  of intelligence (see theories of intelligence on
  next slide)

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Theories of intelligence academic/cognitive
social/emotional

• Charles Spearman
• g (general intelligence)general level of
  intelligence that underlies all levels of
  intelligence (mathematical, verbal, spatial, etc)
• L.L. Thurstone 7 clusters of primary mental
  abilities
• Guilford there are100 mental abilities (invented
  terms convergent and divergent thinking)
• Gardners multiple intelligences
• 8 levels of intelligence including not
  traditional measures of movement, musical, inter-
  and intra-personal
• Sternbergs triarchic
• analytical, creative, and practical (street
  smart)
• Salovey and Myer, Goleman EQ (emotional
  intelligence)
• Why are EQ and MI controversial in the field of
  intelligence theory?

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Is intelligence nature or nurture?

• How heritable is IQ and why is this a
  controversial question?
• Twin studies show higher similarity in IQ scores
  for monozygotic twins than for dizygotic
  twinsdoes this mean IQ is highly heritable?
  (That most of the difference between any 2 people
  in IQ scores is due to differences in their
  genes?)
• Flynn effect Over the past 100 years, IQ scores
  within 20 countries have increased between 10-25
  points (e.g. a 10-year-old today scores on
  average higher than a 10-year-old did 100 years
  ago)
• argument for environmenteducation, increased
  standards of living, nutrition--being key
  influencer in IQ scores (and thus low
  heritability for IQ)

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Is intelligence nature or nurture?

• How heritable is IQ and why is this a
  controversial question?
• Is the 10-15 point difference between
  African-Americans and Caucasian-Americans on IQ
  tests attributable to genetic differences OR
  environmental differences OR testing bias?
• Gains in IQ test scores demonstrated with Head
  Start and early intensive education and nutrition
  (like Milwaukee IQ study) show IQ differences
  between the races can be overcome with proper
  interventions
• Adoptive childrens IQs correlate more with their
  BIO parents IQs than their adoptive parents IQs

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Development and intelligence

• Does early talking correlate with early reading?
• NO!
• Does early reading (by age 4 or 5) correlate with
  future high performance on aptitude tests?
• Yes
• Does performance on intelligence measures at age
  4 predict future aptitudes?
• YES!
• Are intelligence scores fixed or malleable?
• Both!
• IQ is highly malleable in childhood and
  influenced by nutrition, educational opportunity,
  exposure to language, etc.
• By age 7, peoples scores stabilizeyour mental
  age will increase, your crystallized intelligence
  will grow, but your aptitude will likely remain
  similar for the rest of your life
• e.g. 0.86 correlation between performance on
  math SAT and math portion of GRE

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The brain anatomy of intelligence Is the secret
of Einsteins intelligence within the cells and
structures of his brain?

• Does size matter?
• Correlation coefficient between brain mass volume
  and intelligence scores 0.4
• As we age, brain volume decreases, nonverbal IQ
  test scores decrease
• Richard Haiers studies (2004) show positive
  correlation between volume of gray matter (neural
  bodies) in brain and intelligence scores
• What causes larger volume brains to develop?
• Experience, interactions with the environment
• rats deprived of social and environmental stimuli
  develop thinner, lighter cortexes
• neural plasticitybrains ability during
  childhood and adolescence to adapt and grow
  synapses
• Does it matter which areas of ones brain have
  more volume?
• Einsteins brain was NOT larger than average
  persons however his parietal lobe 15 larger
  than average adults
• Einstein also had more glial cells than average
  person

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The brain anatomy of intelligence

• Frontal lobe
• active when people are doing verbal and spatial
  reasoning on intelligence tests
• Whos smarter the tortoise of the hare?
• Speed does seem to matter
• Earl Hunt (1983) experiment correlates verbal IQ
  scores with speed of memory retrieval
• IQ and speed of processing perceptual information
  0.4 correlation
• Speed of neurological processing/reaction time on
  simple tasks positively correlates with IQ scores

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Quick Quiz What do you know about creative
intelligence, testing, and intelligence and
gender?

• Use your notes and each other to try to answer
  the questions on your handout

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1. People who make outstanding creative
contributions to the arts or sciences are most
likely to A) be unusually sensitive to criticism
of their ideas. B) receive above-average scores
on standard tests of intelligence. C) show signs
of savant syndrome. D) be strongly motivated to
attain fame and fortune.   2. The components of
creativity include A) impulsivity and empathy.
B) expertise and a venturesome personality. C)
competitiveness and dogmatism. D) imagination
and extrinsic motivation. 3. Whenever Arlo
reminded himself that his musical skills could
earn him fame and fortune, he became less
creative in his musical performance. This best
illustrates that creativity may be inhibited
by A) emotional intelligence. B) a venturesome
personality. C) the g factor. D) extrinsic
motivation.
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4. Aptitude tests are specifically designed
to A) predict ability to learn a new
skill. B) compare an individuals abilities with
those of highly successful people. C) assess
learned knowledge or skills. D) assess the
ability to produce novel and valuable
ideas.   5. The final exam in a calculus course
would be an example of a(n) ________
test. A) aptitude B) achievement C) standardized D
) general intelligence   6. Assessing current
competence is to ________ tests as predicting
future performance is to ________
tests. A) intelligence standardized B) aptitude
achievement C) standardized intelligence D) achie
vement aptitude
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7. The test that provides separate verbal
comprehension, perceptual organization, working
memory, and processing speed scores, as well as
an overall intelligence score, is
the A) WAIS. B) Stanford-Binet. C) SAT. D) Emotion
al Intelligence Test.   8. When a persons test
performance can be compared with that of a
representative and pretested sample of people,
the test is said to be A) reliable. B) standardize
d. C) valid. D) normally distributed.   9. Dr.
Zimmer has designed a test to measure golfers
knowledge of their sports history. To interpret
scores on it, he is presently administering the
test to a representative sample of all golfers.
Dr. Zimmer is clearly in the process
of A) establishing the tests validity. B) conduct
ing a factor analysis of the test. C) standardizin
g the test. D) establishing the tests
reliability.
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10. Dr. Benthem reports that the scores of 100
male and 100 female students on his new test of
mechanical reasoning form a normal curve. From
his statement we may conclude that A) the average
male score was better than the average female
score. B) the students were simply guessing at
the answers. C) the average score on the test was
50 percent correct. D) relatively few students
scores deviated extremely from the groups
average score.   11. Researchers assess the
correlation between scores obtained on alternate
forms of the same test in order to measure the
________ of the test. A) content
validity B) predictive validity C) normal
distribution D) reliability   12. Dr. Bronfman
has administered her new 100-item test of
abstract reasoning to a large sample of students.
She is presently comparing their scores on the
odd-numbered questions with those on the
even-numbered questions in an effort
to A) determine the tests validity. B) determine
the tests reliability. C) standardize the
test. D) factor-analyze the test.
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13. A test has a high degree of validity if
it A) measures or predicts what it is supposed to
measure or predict. B) yields consistent results
every time it is used. C) produces a normal
distribution of scores. D) has been standardized
on a representative sample of all those who are
likely to take the test.   14. A college
administrator is trying to assess whether an
admissions test accurately predicts how well
applicants will perform at his school. The
administrator is most obviously concerned that
the test is A) standardized. B) valid. C) factor-a
nalyzed. D) normally distributed.   15. On which
of the following tasks are females most likely to
perform as well or better than males? A) playing
checkers B) reciting poetry C) playing video
games D) copying geometric designs
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16. Compared with boys, girls are ________
capable of remembering objects spatial locations
and they are ________ capable of detecting
odors. A) more less B) less more C) more
more D) less less   17. In solving math
computation problems, women perform ________ than
men. In solving math reasoning problems, women
perform ________ than men. A) worse
worse B) better better C) worse
better D) better worse   18. Among children with
a very low level of verbal ability, there are
________ boys than girls among children with a
very high level of math problem-solving ability,
there are ________ boys than girls. A) more
fewer B) fewer more C) more more D) fewer
fewer
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19. On which of the following tasks are males
most likely to outperform females? A) speed-readin
g B) interpreting literature C) learning a
foreign language D) mentally rotating
three-dimensional objects     20. The average
intellectual aptitude gap between graduating
White and Black college graduates has been
observed to ________ during their years in high
school and to ________ during their years in
college. A) decrease decrease B) increase
increase C) decrease increase D) increase
decrease