CHAPTER 8: COGNITIVE AND LANGUAGE

CHAPTER 8.1

COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

• Is the study of how people perceive, learn, remember, and think about
information. A cognitive psychologist might study how people perceives
various shapes, why they remember some facts but forget others, or how
they learn language

Research in Cognitive Psychology

• Choice blindness
• According to Lars Hall and Peter Johansson
• refers to ways in which people are blind to their own choices and preferences

Attention
• is the tendency to respond to and remember some stimuli more than
others.

What are the two basic aspects of attention?

• Bottom up process: when the peripheral stimulus controls your attention.

• Top down process: when you deliberately decide to shift your attention.
• Pre-attentive processes: are when a stimulus stands out immediately.
• Attentive processes: closely observing and searching through an item to
recognize particular features.
The Attention Bottleneck

• attention is limited, as if various items were trying to get through a bottleneck

that permits only a little to pass through at a time.

Conflict in Attention

• An attentional conflict occurs between multiple stimuli when the subject is

interested in paying attention to each stimulus.

Stroop effect

• The tendency to read the words instead of saying the color of ink.

Change of blindness

• The failure to detect changes in parts of a scene, often if they occur

slowly or during an eye movement.

Attention Deficit Disorder

• is characterized by easy distraction, impulsiveness, moodiness, and

failure to follow through on plans.

Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)

• excessive activity and “fidgetiness.”

Priming

• A Reading or hearing one word makes it easier to think or recognize a related

word.

Prototype

• A familiar or typical example of something.

Conceptual Networks and Priming

• We represent words or concepts with links to related concepts.

Spreading activation

• We also link a word or concept to related concepts, and thinking about one of
the concepts will activate, or prime, the concepts linked to it through a process.

CHAPTER 8.2

TWO TYPES OF THINKING AND PROBLEMS SOLVING

TWO TYPES OF THINKING

• SYSTEM 1
System 1 is a fast thinking, automatic happens, unconsciously and requires
minimal effort.
•SYSTEM 2
System 2 is basically slow thinking it is lower requires effort and happens
consciously and deliberately.

TWO TYPES OF PROBLEM SOLVING

•HEURISTIC
• Heuristics are rules-of-thumb that can be applied to guide decision-
making based on a more limited subset of the available information.

• ALGORITHM
• An algorithm is a defined set of step-by-step procedures that provides the
correct answer to a particular problem.

MAXIMIZING AND SATISFYING

•MAXIMIZING
• Maximizing is to consider thoroughly every possible choice to find the best
one.

•SATISFYING
-Satisfying is searching only until You find something satisfactory. Means picking
the first option that satisfies the requirements.
THE REPRESENTATIVENESS HEURISTIC AND BASED RATE INFORMATION

• REPRESENTATIVE HEURISTIC
• Representativeness Heuristic if something resembles members of some
category
•
•AVAILABILITY HEURISTIC
• The availability heuristic describes our tendency to use information that
comes to mind quickly and easily when making decisions about the
future.

OTHER COMMON ERRORS IN HUMAN COGNITION

• OVERCONFIDENCE
• Characterized by an overestimation of one’s actual ability to perform a
task successfully, by a belief that one’s performance is better than that of
others, or by excessive certainty in the accuracy of one’s beliefs.

•CONFIRMATION BIAS
• bias is a tendency of people to favor Information that confirms their
beliefs or hypothesis.

•FUNCTIONAL FIXEDNESS
• The tendency to adhere to a single approach or a single way of using an
item.
•FRAMING EFFECT
• Framing effect is when our decisions are influenced by the way
information is presented.

•THE SUNK COST EFFECT

• Sunk cost effect is manifested in a greater tendency to continue an
endeavor once an investment in money, effort, or time has been made.

• EXPERTISE
• Refers to the mechanisms underlying the superior achievement of an
expert one who has acquired special skill in or knowledge of a particular
subject through professional training and practical experience.

• EXPERT PATTERN RECOGNITION

• Pattern recognition is the automated recognition of patterns and

regularities in data.

NEAR TRANSFER AND FAR TRANSFER

•NEAR TRANSFER
• Benefit to a new skill based on practice of a similar skill is a robust
phenomenon is easy to demonstrate.
•FAR TRANSFER
• Benefit for practicing something less similar Is more difficult Suppose you
learn to solve problem.

CHAPTER 8.3

Language Productivity

▪ The ability to combine words into new sentences that express an unlimited
variety of ideas.

Transformational grammar

▪ A System for converting a deep structure into a surface structure.

Deep structure

▪ An underlying logic or meaning of a sentence.

Surface Structure

▪ A sequence of words as they are actually spoken or written.

Nonhuman Precursors to Language

Terrence Deacon, Ph.D.

An Author, Researcher, and a Professor of Biological Anthropology
and Linguistic of California Berkeley. His work extends from laboratory-
based cellular-molecular neurobiology to study the semiotic
processes underlying animal and human communication, especially
language.

Chimpanzees
▪ They use gestures in nature.
▪ They learned to use symbols and Ameslan sign language.

Bonobos
▪ They communicate through observation and imitation.
▪ They were more successful than Chimpanzees to use the
language.

William Syndrome

▪ A Genetic condition characterized by mental retardation in most regards

but surprisingly good use of language relative to other abilities.
▪ People with this condition often show problems in attention and planning.
Evidently, Language ability is not the same as overall intelligence.

Language Acquisition device (LAD)

▪ A built-in mechanism for acquiring language.

Aphasia
▪ is a disorder that results from damage to areas of the brain that produce
and process language.

Aphasia in two areas of the brain:

Broca's area (Broca Aphasia)

▪ Located in the Frontal cortex of the brain.

▪ A condition characterized by difficulties in Language production.

Wernicke's Area (Wernicke's Aphasia)

▪ Located in the Temporal cortex of the brain.

▪ A condition marked by impaired recall of nouns and impaired language
comprehension, despite fluent and Grammatical speech.

Language in EARLY CHILDHOOD: Progression through these stages depends

largely on maturation.
Children exposed to NO LANGUAGE

o Fail to show a Language on their own

o Fail to learn more Language
o Most likely to Invent languages/signs

BILINGUAL

▪ Learning two languages

DISADVANTAGES OF BILINGUALISM

o It will take longer to master two Languages.

o Bilingual people often take longer than average to think of a word.

ADVANTAGES OF BILINGUALISM

▪ Bilingual people can communicate more people.

▪ Bilingual people learn to control their attention more effectively.

UNDERSTANDING LANGUAGES

WE UNDERSTAND LANGUAGES BASED HOW AWARE WE ARE ON THE LANGUAGES USED,

AND ITS MEANINGS.

UNDERSTANDING WORDS

CONTEXT NOT ONLY DETERMINES HOW WE INTERPRET A WORD, BUT ALSO PRIMES US TO
HEAR AN AMBIGUOUS MEANING OF EACH WORDS.

UNDERSTANDING SENTENCES
UNDERSTANDING A SENTENCE DEPENDS ON YOUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE WORLD AND ALL
THE ASSUMPTIONS THAT YOU SHARE WITH ANOTHER PERSON.

LIMITS TO OUR LANGUAGE UNDERSTANDING

Embedded sentences

- Overburden our memory.

READING

Phoneme

- A unit of sound, such as f or sh.

Morpheme

- A unit of meaning.

WORD RECOGNITION

Recognition

- It is an Identification of someone or something or person from previous encounters or

knowledge.

Word-superiority effect
- It is an ability to Identify the letter more accurately when it is part of a word than
when it is presented by itself.

Reading and Eye Movements

Fixations

▪ When your eyes are stationary.

Saccades

▪ Quick eye movements from one fixation point to another