Chapter 14/15: Differences In Cognition Flashcards
Gardner’s “Multiple Intelligences”
- Linguistic intelligence
- Logical-mathematical intelligence
- Musical intelligence
- Bodily- kinesthetic intelligence
- Spatial intelligence
- Interpersonal intelligence
- Intrapersonal intelligence
- Naturalist intelligence
- Existential intelligence
Cognitive Style
Habitual and preferred means of approaching cognitive tasks
- Personality and motivating factors that influence the way a person approaches a cognitive task
- Field independence
- Field dependence
Field Independence
Reliance on internal referents in processing information
Field Dependence
Reliance on external referents
Reflexivity/ Impulsivity
Extent to which a child delays response in the course of searching for the correct alternative
- Reflexivity- respond slowly and make few errors - Impulsivity- respond rapidly and make many errors
Aka cognitive tempo
Need for Cognition
Person’s motivation to take an intellectual tasks and challenges
Learning Styles
We have learning preferences but not styles
Younger children
Impulsive and field-dependent
Older children
Reflective and field-independent
Expert/ novice differences
Level of knowledge in domain affects your cognition within that domain
- Perceive more subtle distinctions than novices
- Categorize on basis of deeper principles than novices
- See patterns that novices fail to see
Effects of aging on cognition
Older adults perform less well in
- Divided attention - Speech recognition and speech discrimination - Some memory tasks
Differences depend on
- Intelligence - Health - Years of formal education - Expertise
Gender: Verbal Abilities
- Females better than males on some tests
- Effect size is small
Gender: Visuospatial abilities
- Mental rotation: men outperform women
- Difference is primarily in speed, not accuracy
SES and mental rotation
Gender difference in spatial performance, but only for middle- and high-SES student
Quantitative Abilities
- Boys and girls similar through elementary school
- Boys start outperforming girls at age 12 or 13
- Gifted 7th and 8th grade boys outperform girls on math SAT
Gender differences in cognitive style
Faces with unsolvable task, negative feedback:
- Boys: “mastery orientation” - Girls: “helpless orientation”
Mastery Orientation
Sets goals to challenge themselves and increase competence/ mastery
Helpless Orientation
Fail to set challenging goals and give up easily
Feminist Theories
- Connected knowing: women
- Separate knowing: men
Connected knowing
One discovers “truth” through conscious process of trying to understand
Separate knowing
Mastery of info to be learned (no engagement with)
Cultural Universality
Phenomena believed common to humankind such as the use of language
Cultural Relativism
Certain concepts, process, capacities are only found in certain cultures
People in […] are more susceptible to Muller-Lyer illusion
People in carpentered environments are more susceptible to Muller-Lyer illusion
Carpentered environments
Environments with blocks, goals, and lines
The horizontal-vertical illusion
Tendency for observers to overestimate the length of a vertical line relative to a horizontal line of the same length
-People who regularly see the horizon (very far away) are more susceptible to this illusion
Visuospatial memory and culture
- Australian Aboriginal children outperform white Australians on memory for objects
- Aboriginals approached task more visually
Counting across cultures
- One-on-one: each item in to-be-counted array is “ticked” in way that one and only one distinct “tick” is assigned to each item
- Stable- order: tags assigned to each item must be chosen in repeatable order
- Cardinal principle: when one is counting an array, final tag represents number of items in set
- Abstraction: any group of items, whether physical or not and whether of same type or to, can be counted
- Order irrelevance: order of enumeration of items in set does not affect number of items in set or counting procedure
Oksapmin system in New Guinea
Baseless numeration system
Literacy
Ability to read or write
Differences of interest to cognitive psychologists
- Differences in ability (capacities to carry out cognitive tasks)
- Differences in style (characteristic manner in which one approaches cognitive tasks)
Some cognitive ability differences
- Verbal comprehension- understand words, sentences, and paragraphs
- Sensitivity to problems- suggests ways to solve problems
- Syllogistic reasoning- draw conclusions from premises
- Number facility- compute arithmetic operations
- Induction- indicate principle of relations
- General reasoning- find solution to algebraic problems
- Associative memory- produce words similar in meaning to given word
- Span memory- immediately recall set of elements after one presentation
- Visualization- mentally manipulate forms to visualize how it would look
- Spatial orientation- visually imagine parts out of place and put them in place
- Length estimation- estimate length or distances between points
Ability difference exist within all […] levels
Ability difference exist within all age levels
6 conclusions regarding tests of cognitive ability
- There is such a thing as a general factor of cognitive ability on which human beings differ
- All standardized tests of academic aptitude or achievement measure this general factor to some degree, but IQ tests expressly designed for that purpose measure it most accurately
- IQ scores match, to a first degree, whatever it is that people mean when they use the word intelligent or smart in ordinary language
- IQ scores are stable, although not perfectly so, over much of a person’s life
- Properly administered IQ tests are not demonstrably biased against social, economic, ethnic, or racial groups
- Cognitive ability is substantially heritable, apparently no less than 40% and no more than 80%
Linguistic Intelligence
The capacity to use language to communicate and to accomplish other goals
- sensitivities to subtleties in both written and spoken language
- ability to learn foreign languages
Logical-mathematical intelligence
Ability to solve problems, design and conduct experiments, draw inferences
- the capacity to analyze situations
Musical intelligence
The ability to analyze and respond to musical patterns
- to compose or perform music
Bodily-kinesthetic intelligence
The ability to use one’s body artistically or athletically
- to create physical products - to use either the whole body or parts of the body skillfully
Spatial intelligence
The ability to navigate skillfully through both wide and confined spaces
- to visualize spatial scenes - to create products with spatial properties
Interpersonal intelligence
The capacity to understand other people’s emotions, motivations, intentions, and desires
- the ability to work effectively with others
Intrapersonal intelligence
The ability to understand one’s own emotions, motivations, intentions, and desires and to use the information for self-regulation
Naturalistic Intelligence
The ability to recognize flora and fauna of one’s environment
- to skillfully classify organisms with respect to species and to chart the relationships among different species
Existential intelligence
The capacity to see one’s place in the cosmos, especially in light of such issues as the nature of human condition, the significance of life, the meaning of death, and the ultimate fate of the world both physical and psychological
3 underlying dimensions of cognitive style
- Selective attention
- Attentional control
- Stimulus organization
Learning Style Hypothesis
Only receives support if an experiment reveals crossover interaction between learning style and method
- Crossover interaction- factor has one kind of effect in one condition and the opposite kind of effect in another condition
Methodological techniques used when reviewing existing literature
- Narrative review
- Vote Counting
- Meta-analysis
Narrative Review
Involves locating and reading as many source as one can and then writing up one’s conclusions
Vote Counting
Involves listing each study and counting the number of studies in the total that demonstrate that particular effect
Meta-analysis
Use of statistical methods to integrate findings from different studies
Verbal Abilities
Breadth of vocabulary, speech fluency, grammar, spelling, reading comprehension, oral comprehension, and ability to solve language puzzles (verbal analogies and anagrams)
Achievement Motivation
Ways people define and set goals, particularly goals that are presumed to relate to their own competence
- Mastery orientation
- Helpless orientation
Cultural Syndromes
- Tightness
- Cultural Complexity
- Active-Passive
- Honor
- Collectivism
- Individualism
- Vertical and Horizontal Relationships
Hudson and Colleen Picture Perception
- People in school= 3D interpretation
- Nonliterate people= 2D interpretation
Increased schooling
Decreased interpretation
Increased factual, disembodies pieces of info
Miyamoto: If Japanese environment is more cluttered, could this be the reason that…
- American participants in change-blindness tasks notice more difference in focal objects than Japanese participants do?
- Japanese participants notice more difference in the “background” than American participants do?
Culture and memory
- Kpelle children of Liberia: not big difference between schooled and unschooled children
- U.S. children clustering: big difference between schooled and unschooled children due to clustering
Categorization and Culture
Choose between the two items in each set that are most alike
- First use, perceptual bases, especially color
- Start to group together based on function and not form
- Schooling had big role in this change
Limitations of non literal people and reasoning
- Difficulty accepting initial premises that contradicted own experience
- Refused to treat general premises as truly general
- Those lacking literacy tended not to see the various premises as parts of a single problem but rather treated all the premises as independent pieces of information
Nonliteracy vs schooling
Nonliterate group: most likely to respond to tasks in concrete, perceptual, and context-bound manner
Schooled group: greater ability or propensity to deal with materials more abstractly and conceptually
-Could reason from premises and draw inferences based on something other than their own experience
Literacy vs Schooling
Schooling:
- increased ability to to provide verbal explanations and justifications
Literacy or schooling doesn’t have significant effects on the ways cognitive processes operate
Situated Cognition
“Cultural” context affects performance right here at home
- On- the- job cognition
