Psycog

Language
• 7000 languages spoken in the world today
• New Guinea: more than 850 indigenous language
• China's Yunnan province: 18 languages
• There are still languages today that have not even been "discovered" and named
by scientists.
• Philippines: 175 dialects: 8 major dialects
• What exactly constitutes a language, and are there some things that all
languages have in common?

Properties of language
• Communicative - Language permits us to communicate with one or more people
who share our language.
• Arbitrarily- symbolic - Language creates an arbitrary relationship between a
symbol and what it represents: an idea, a thing, a process,
a relationship, or a description.
• Regularly- structured - Language has a structure; only particularly patterned
arrangements of symbols have meaning, and different
arrangements yield different meanings.
• Structured at multiple levels - The structure of language can be analyzed at
more than one level (e.g., in sounds, meaning units,
words, and phrases).
• Generative;- productive - Within the limits of a linguistic structure, language
users can produce novel utterances. The possibilities
for creating new utterances are virtually limitless.
• Dynamic - Languages constantly evolve.

Whan that aprill with his shoures soote: When April with his showers sweet with fruit

The droghte of march hath perced to the roote: The drought of March has pierced untothe root

• Language and thoughts - One of the most interesting areas in the study of
language is the relationship between language and the
thinking of the human mind. Many people believe that
language shapes thoughts.
The sapir-whorf hypothesis
• The term culture refers to the beliefs, norms, and values exhibited by a society.
• how sexist language influences the way in which our society views men and
women
• For instance, we use words like 'fireman, 'policeman,' and 'male nurse.'
• Language also affects how we encode, store, and retrieve information in memory.

Linguistic relativity or linguistic universals

Colors - An area that illustrates much of this research focuses on color names.
- These words provide an especially convenient way of testing for universals.
- Why? Because people in every culture can be expected to be exposed, at
least potentially, to pretty much the same range of colors.
Concepts - An intriguing experiment assessed the possible effects of linguistic
relativity by studying people who speak more than one language.

Bilingualism -an advantage or disadvantage

• Different participant populations, different methodologies, different language
groups, and different experimenter biases may have contributed to the
inconsistency in the literature
• Consider what happens when bilinguals are balanced bilinguals, who are roughly
equally fluent in both languages, and when they come from middle-class
backgrounds.

Neuroscience and bilingualism - Learning a second language increases the gray

matter in the left inferior parietal cortex
- Thus, the more proficient a person is in a second
language, the denser this area of the brain will be.
Slips of the tongue - An area of particular interest to cognitive psychologists is how
people use language incorrectly.
- Studying speech errors helps cognitive psychologists better
understand normal language processing.
- Freudian psychoanalysts have suggested that in Freudian slips,
the verbal slips reflect some kind of unconscious processing
that has psychological significance. The slips are alleged often
to indicate repressed emotions.
- For example, a business competitor may say, "I'm glad to beat
you," when what was overtly intended was, "I'm glad to meet
you."
People tend to make various kinds of slips in their conversations (speech
errors):

Anticipation - the speaker uses a language element before it is appropriate in the

sentence because it corresponds to an element that will be needed later
in the utterance.
- For example, instead of saying, "an inspiring expression,"
a speaker might say, "an expiring expression."
Preservation - the speaker uses a language element that was appropriate earlier in
the sentence but that is not appropriate later on.
- For example, a speaker might say, "We sat down to a bounteous beast"
instead of a "bounteous feast."
Substitution - The speaker substitutes one language element for another.
- For example, you may have warned someone to do something "after
it is too late," when you meant "before it is too late."
Reversal (also called “transposition") - the speaker switches the positions of two
language elements. This reversal captivated
language users so much that it is now the
preferred form. Sometimes, reversals can be
fortuitously opportune.
- An example is the reversal that reportedly led
"flutterby" to become "butterfly."
Spoonerisms - the initial sounds of two words are reversed and make two entirely
different words. The term si named after the Reverend William
Spooner, who was famous for them.
• arty panimal (party animal)
• chork pops (pork chops)
• sark died (dark side)

Pinker's theory of indirect speech

• Steven pinker and his colleagues (2007) recently developed a three-part theory
of indirect speech
• according to the three part theory; indirect speech can serve three purposes:

Plausible deniability - Imagine a policeman pulls you over when you are driving
and wants to give you a traffic ticket.
Relationship negotiation - This occurs when a person uses indirect language
because the nature of a relationship is ambiguous.

Example: each person gets something in exchange for giving something their partner
wants. (You listen to my problem, do not talk until I say so, No sex until marriage)

Language as a digital medium of indirect as well as direct communication -

Language can serve purposes other than direct communication.

For example, suppose the emperor believes he is wearing fine robes when he is in fact
naked. Aboy shouts out, "The emperor has no clothes."
Neuropsychology of Language
• The Brain and Semantic Processing
• Where does semantic processing take place then? Research shows a relatively
consistent picture. The evidence comes from studies involving patients with
Alzheimer's disease, aphasia, autism, and many other disorders.

There are five brain regions that are involved in the storage and retrieval of meaning
(Binder, 2009):
• the ventral temporal lobes, including middle and inferior temporal, anterior
fusiform, and anterior parahippocampal gyri;
• the angular gyrus;
• the anterior aspect (pars orbitalis) of the inferior frontal gyrus;
• the dorsal prefrontal cortex; and
• the posterior cingulate gyrus.

Problem Solving and Creativity

how do you solve problems that arise in your relationships with other people?
Types of problems

Well-Structured Problems
Example: On tests in school, your teachers have asked you to tackle
countless well-structured problems ni specific content areas (e.g., math, history,
geography).

Isomorphic problems
Sudoku puzzle, Tower of Hanoi
What is the key reason that some problems are easier to solve than others
that are isomorphic to them?

Obstacles and Aids to Problem Solving

• One factor that can hinder problem solving is mental set—a frame of mind
involving an existing model for representing a problem, a problem context, or a
procedure for problem solving.
• Another term for mental set is entrenchment. When problem solvers have an
entrenched mental set, they fixate on a strategy that normally works well in
solving many problems but that does not work well in solving this particular
problem.

For example, in the two-string problem, you may fixate on strategies that involve
moving yourself toward the string, rather than moving the string
toward you.
Knowledge and Problem Solving
• Even people who do not have expertise in cognitive psychology recognize that
knowledge, particularly expert knowledge, greatly enhances problem solving.
• Expertise is superior skills or achievement reflecting a well-developed and well-
organized knowledge base

Creativity
How can we possibly define creativity as a single construct that unifies the work of
Leonardo da Vinci and Marie Curie, of Vincent Van Gogh and Isaac Newton, and of
Toni Morrison and Albert Einstein?

Many examples of creativity focus on divergent thinking (thinking that is open ended
involving a large number of
potential "solutions".

Ten things that highly creative people do differently

Imaginative Play - Children's engagement in imaginative play enables them to
experiment with different types of experience. Carried into
adulthood, this playfulness supports innovation.
Passion - Focusing on a particular pursuit that the person loves and ant to devote
his or her life.
Daydreaming - Mind wandering that occurs when a person's attention shifts from
external environment to internally generated, often involuntary,
thoughts.
Solitude - Solitary reflection that is facilitated by being alone in order to avoid
distractions.
Intuition - Intuitive thoughts or insights arriving from unconscious information-
processing systems. These often occur unexpectedly although they are
often.
Openness to Experience - The drive for cognitive exploration of one's inner mind
and the outer world.
Mindfulness - Paying attention to what is happening in our mind and in the
environment. Has been associated with some types of meditation.
Sensitivity - Heightened awareness of the environment and processing occurring in
the mind.
Turning Adversity into Advantage - Creativity arising out of loss, suffering or
trauma. Both good and bad life events potential
sources of inspiration and motivation.
Thinking Differently - Rejection of traditional ways of thinking. Being open to a
new paradigms.

Neuroscience and Creativity - The examination of creative thought and production

has led researchers to identify brain regions that are active during creativity The
prefrontal regions are especially active during the creative process, regardless of
whether the creative thought is effortful or spontaneous
Decision-making and Reasoning
• In the course of our everyday lives, we constantly are making judgments and
decisions.
• One of the most important decisions you may have made is that of whether and
where to go to college.
• Once in college, you still need to decide on which courses to take.
• Later on, you may need to choose a major field of study. You make decisions
about friends, dates, how to relate to your parents, how to spend money, and
countless other things.
• How do you go about making these decisions.

Classical decision theory

• The earliest models of how people make decisions are referred to as classical
decision theory.
• Most of these models were devised by economists, statisticians, and philoso
phers, not by psychologists.
• Hence, they reflect the strengths of an economic perspective.
• One such strength is the ease of developing and using mathematical models for
human behavior

Heuristics - are mental shortcuts that lighten the cognitive load of making decisions.
Satisficing - we consider options one by one, and then we select an option as soon
as we find one that is satisfactory or just good enough to meet our
minimum level of acceptability

For example: satisficing might be a reasonable strategy if you are in a hurry to buy a
pack of gum and then catch a train or a plane, but a poor strategy for diagnosing a
disease

Elimination by aspects - We sometimes use a different strategy when faced with far
more alternatives than we feel that we reasonably can
consider in the time we have available.

Representativeness heuristic - All the families having exactly six children in a

particular city were surveyed.

Example,
• In 72 of the families, the exact order of births of boys and girls was
GBGBBG(G, girl; B, boy)
• suppose people are asked to judge the probability of flips ofa coin yielding the
sequence H T H HT H(H, heads; T, tails).
• suppose we have not heard a weather report prior to stepping outside. We
informally judge the probability that it will rain. We base our judgment on how well
the characteristics of this day (e.g., the month of the year, the area in which we
live, and the presence or absence of clouds in the sky) represent the
characteristics of days on which it rains.
Availability heuristic - in which we make judgments on the basis of how easily we
can call to mind what we per ceive as relevant instances of
a phenomenon

For example:
1. consider the letter R. Are there more words in the
English language that begin with the letter Ror that have R as their third
letter?
2. For one group the form was _ - - _ing (i.e., seven letters ending in -ing). For the
other group the form
was _ - - - _n_ (i.e., seven letters with n as the second-to-the-last letter)

Anchoring - A heuristic related to availability is the anchoring-and-adjustment

heuristic, by which people adjust their evaluations of things by means
of certain reference points called end-anchors

For example, when the price of a TV set is given as Php 3,000, people adjust their
estimate of its production costs more than when the price is given as Php 2,991.

Framing - Another consideration in decision theory is the influence of framing

effects, in which the way that the options are presented influences the
selection of an option.
 Biases - the tendency to make decisions or take action in an unknowingly irrational
way. It can harm not only your decision making, but also your judgment,
values, and social interactions.

Illusory correlation - We are predisposed to see particular events or attributes

and categories as going together, even when they do not.

Overconfidence - For example, when people were 100% confident in their answers,
they were right only 80% of the time.

Why are people overconfident?

One reason is that people may not realize how little they know. Another is that they
may not realize that their information comes from unreliable sources

Hindsight bias - when we look at a situation retrospectively, we believe we easily can

see all the signs and events leading up to a particular outcome. Ex,
Helping a friend with her crush.

Fallacies - Heuristics and fallacies are often studied together because they go hand
in hand. The application of a heuristic to make a decision may lead to
fallacies in thinking.
Gambler’s Fallacy and the Hot Hand Gambler’s fallacy
• is a mistaken belief that the probability of a given random event, such as winning
or losing at a game of chance, is influenced by previous random events.
• For example, a gambler who loses five successive bets may believe that a win is
therefore more likely the sixth time. He feels that he is “due” to win.
• A tendency opposite to that of gambler’s fallacy is called the “hot hand” effect. It
refers to a belief that a certain course of events will continue.

Conjunction Fallacy
• In the conjunction fallacy, an individual gives a higher estimate for a subset of
events (e.g., the instances of -ing) than for the larger set of events containing the
given subset (e.g., the instances of n as the second- to-the-last letter).

Sunk-Cost Fallacy
• An error in judgment that is quite common in people’s thinking is the sunk- cost
fallacy (Dupuy, 1998, 1999; Strough et al., 2008). This fallacy represents the
decision to continue to invest in something simply because one has invested in it
before and one hopes to recover one’s investment.

How Experts Solve Problems

Experts - people who, by devoting a large amount of time to learning about a field
and practicing and applying that learning.

For example:
Spending 10,000–20,000 hours playing and studying chess, some chess players
have reached the rank of grand master.
Not surprisingly, experts tend to be better than nonexperts at solving problems in
their field.

Research on the nature of expertise has focused on determining differences between

the way experts and nonexperts go about solving problems.

Differences Between How EXPERTS and NOVICES Solve Problems

Experts - in a particular field usually solve problems faster with a higher success
rate than do novices.

• But what is behind this faster speed and greater success?

• Are experts smarter than novices?
• Are they better at reasoning in general?
• Do they approach problems in a different way?

1. Experts Possess More Knowledge About Their Fields

Example,
Chess Master
• Placed 16 pieces out of 24 correctly on his first try
• Able to recognize these specific arrangements of pieces
• Has about 50,000 patterns in his or her memory
Novice
• 4 out of 24 for the beginner
• 1,000 patterns for a good player
The purposes of problem solving is not just that the expert’s mind contains lots of
knowledge, but that this knowledge is organized so it can be accessed when needed
to work on a problem.

2. Experts’ Knowledge Is Organized Differently From Novices’

Example,
Physics Professor
• The underlying principles involved
Physics Student
• What the objects looked like

Experts’ ability to organize knowledge has been found to be important not only
chess masters and physics professors, but for experts in many other fields as well.

3. Experts Spend More Time Analyzing Problems

• Experts often get off to what appears to be a slow start on a problem, because
they spend time trying to understand the problem rather than immediately
trying to solve it.
• Although this may slow them down at the beginning, this strategy usually pays
off in a more effective approach to the problem.

Expertise is only an Advantage in the Expert’s Specialty

• Although there are many differences between experts and novices, it appears that
these differences hold only when problems are within an expert’s field.
When James Voss and coworkers (1983) posed a real-world problem involving
Russian agriculture to expert political scientists, expert chemists, and novice
political scientists, they found that the EXPERT POLITICAL SCIENTIST
performed best and that the expert chemists performed as poorly as the novice
political scientists.

In general, experts are experts only within their own field and perform like anyone
else outside of their field.

NOTE:
• Being an expert is not always an advantage
• Experts may be less open to new ways of looking at problems.
• Expert may be a disadvantage when confronting a problem that requires flexible
thinking

Creative Problem Solving

• Sometimes being too creative can get you into trouble.
• Student’s was able to answer to the professor’s question, although perhaps not
what the professor was looking for, surely qualified as being creative.

Creativity - Involves innovative thinking, generating novel ideas, or making new

connections between existing ideas to create something new.

Creativity is often associated with DIVERGENT THINKING and

CONVERGENT THINKING.
Divergent thinking - is open-ended, involving a large number of potential “solutions”
and no “correct” answer
Convergent thinking - finding a solution to a specific problem that usually has a
correct answer
Design fixation - tendency to approach a given problem in a set way that limits
one's ability to shift to a new approach to that problem.
Phenomenon of overlooking better ways of solving problems.
Creative cognition - train people to think creatively

This exercise is patterned after one devised by Ronald Finke 1990, 1995), who
randomly selected three of the object parts from Figure

Preinventive forms - ideas that precede the creation of a finished creative product

• Finke demonstrated not only that you don’t have to be an “inventor”

• Finke found that people were more likely to come up with creative uses for
preinventive objects
• Fixations can inhibit problem solving.
• Although there is certainly something special about creativity, it appears we can
understand some aspects of creativity in terms of general cognitive principles.
An Alternative View of Reasoning
It is the ecological rationality perspective

Examples:
• Buying a phone
• Making hiring decisions

Dual process theories hold that there are two distinct processing modes available
for many cognitive tasks:

Associative System - this system is responsible for quick and spontaneous

responses, often driven by emotions or gut feelings.his efficient in processing familiar
and continue task but it can also lead to biases or errors in judgement.

Example, label is driving a car, and as she approaches a red traffic light, she comes
to a complete stop

Rule-based System - refers to the reflective and cognitive process that relies on
logical analysis, reasoning and conscious decision making.

Example, Solving complex mathematical problems

Neuroscience of Reasoning
Brain Regions in Reasoning
• Reasoning engages the PREFRONTAL CORTEX, as evidenced by studies
such as Bunge et al. (2004).
• Working memory, associated with the BASAL GANGLIA, plays a crucial role
in integrating information during reasoning.

Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex

• This is your brain’s command center for high level tasks like planning and
decision making.

Anterior Cingulate Cortex

• Emotional apparaisals, cognitive control, error conflict (Passeo, 2008; Stevens
et al.)

Basal Ganglia Functions

• are involved in various functions, including cognition and learning.
• associated with the prefrontal cortex through multiple connections.

Role of Working Memory

• Working memory is vital in reasoning due to the need for information integration.
• Basal ganglia’s involvement in working memory processes during reasoning.

Brain Process in Reasoning

• Left lateral frontal lobe more active during syllogistic reasoning
• Left fronto-lateral cortex and basal ganglia activated during integration for both
conditional and syllogistic reasoning.
Syllogistic Reasoning Activation
Distinct Activation: Syllogistic reasoming involves additional activation in the lateral
parietal cortex, precuneus, and left ventral fronto-lateral cortex.

• Lateral Parietal Cortex: This area is involved in spatial cognition, attention, and
working memory.
• Precuneus: associated with various higher cognitive functions, including
visuospatial processing, self- awareness, and episodic memory.
• Left Ventral Fronto-lateral Cortex: particularly in the frontal lobe, is often
associated with language processing and semantic memory.

Understanding Individual Differences

What are individual differences?
• Individual differences refer to the variations in how people approach the same
cognitive tasks.
• These differences can arise from various factors such as genetics, environment,
experiences, and personal choices.

Two main types of individual differences

Abilities (capacity for cognitive tasks)
• Abilities are the skills our brain uses to think and solve problems. Imagine it like
different tools in a toolbox.
• Some people might be really good at puzzles, while others are great at
remembering lots of information.
• This is because everyone has their own set of tools, or abilities, that they use for
thinking.
Example: Sarah might be excellent at understanding new languages quickly, showing
her strong linguistic abilities.

Styles (characteristic approachhes to cognitive tasks)

• Styles are like the unique ways we prefer to do things with our brains. It's how
we like to tackle problems or learn new stuff.
• Think of it as having a favorite way to study or solve a puzzle.
• Some people might prefer to see the big picture first, while others like to focus on
details.

Example: James might have a visual learning style, meaning he learns better when he
sees pictures or diagrams instead of just reading words.

Ability Differences

Cognitive abilities and Intelligence

Cognitive Abilities
• are the specific mental skills that our brain employs to execute vital daily tasks.
• Cognitive talents arise naturally in the brain, but they can be enhanced and
strengthened by challenging oneself.

There are four types of cognitive abilities:

+ Attention
+ Memory
+ Logic and reasoning
+ Auditory and visual processing
Intelligence
• According to Hunt (1986), "Intelligence is simply a shorthand term for the
variation in competence on cognitive activities that has a statistical correlation
with personal variables.
• "It is defined as the ability to understand, learn from experience, solve issues, and
adapt to new situations.

General Mental Ability VS Intellectual Abilites

General Mental Ability
• General Mental Ability also called the “g factor” or “general intelligence” is
commonly used to describe a broad, all-encompassing cognitive capacity of a
person that influences performance across a variety of cognitive tasks.
• Thurstone's method identified seven fundamental mental abilities: verbal
understanding, word fluency, associative memory, spatial imagery, perceptual
speed, number facility, and reasoning.

Intellectual Abilities
• Intellectual Abilities indicates specific range of cognitive skills or capacities such
as verbal understanding, spatial thinking, memory, and problem-solving.
• These cognitive capacities add to the larger construct of general mental capacity
or intelligence.
Studies on Ability Differences
Expert & Novice Differences