Cognition, Intelligence and Language Flashcards
What does psychology deal with?
PSYCHOLOGY deals with ‘the scientific study of the human mind and its functions, especially those affecting behavior in a given context; it’s a study of mental process.
What is Cognitive psychology?
COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY specifically looks at ‘the psychological study of higher mental processes, including thinking and perception’
What is Cognition?
Cognition looks at
‘the mental action or process
of acquiring knowledge and understanding
through thought, experience, and the senses’.
Cognition includes:
- Thinking
- Decision making
- Intelligence
What is thinking?
Thinking is the:
• the mental manipulation of internal representations of objects,
activities, problems, or situations.
• When we are thinking we make use of certain mental structures or systems of symbols.
Involves: Problem-solving
[ Mental images, concepts, and language]
These are the basic units of thinking
Basic units of thought
- Mental images
- Concepts
- Language (symbols)
Mental images, what are they?
They are – mental representations that have picture-like qualities –
more than just pictures includes images formed by other senses or a combination of senses.
What are concepts?
Concepts are – ideas that represent categories of objects or events, simplify the world.
- Building blocks of thinking that help us to organize information
- Hierarchical organization of concepts:
- Superordinate level – food
- Intermediate level – fruit
- Subordinate level – apple
Language (symbols) define.
words or symbols and rules for combining them.
Symbols also include mathematical formula, pictures, graphs, and maps
Discuss mental images.
• Occur in a mental space; can be manipulated, picked up, rotated and scanned.
• Mental images are not flat, like photographs.
• Mental rotation is partly based on imagined movements. ie we mentally
“pick up: an object and turn it around
How are mental images formed?
• Formation of mental images reverses operation from memory to visual cortex, where the image is recreated. • Other sensory modalities, including kinesthetic images – muscular sensations
In general:
• 97% of us have visual images
• 92% have auditory images
• More than 50% have imagery for movement, touch, smell, and pain
We use (mental) images to do what?
think, remember, and solve problems. • Make a decision or solve a problem • Improve a skill • Change a feeling • Aid memory
• People with good imaging score high on creativity
Synesthesia
images cross normal sensory barriers. Chicken tastes
‘pointy’, sounds like a ‘bottom’, sounds have colors, etc
Concept formation
-It is a process of classifying information into meaningful categories.
e.g What is this? [picture showing a dog]
You reply dog… next question is what type of a dog is that?
Conceptual rule and conceptual errors
Conceptual rules: guidelines for deciding whether objects or events belong to a concept class.
Conceptual errors: oversimplification of a complex category – eg.
stereotypes
Prototype
Prototype: Representative example of a concept; exhibits the typical
features and acts as a reference point.
• The process of concept formation is the part of the mind’s attempt to
function economically, to minimize processing time and effort
• Helps us to identify things efficiently
• We mentally compare things we see to prototypes
Types of meaning
- Denotative meaning (exact definition)
* Connotative meaning (emotional or personal meaning)
Faulty concepts
Using inaccurate concepts often leads to thinking errors.
e. g. social stereotypes
e. g. all-or-nothing thinking
Thinking styles may be Logical, Illogical, deductive, and inductive. What do all these mean?
- Logical: proceed from given information to new conclusions on basis of explicit rules
- Illogical: intuitive, associative, or personal
- Deductive: going from general principles to specific situations
- Inductive: going from specific facts or observations to general principles.
Thinking creatively.
Includes all thinking styles plus:
• Fluency: defined as the total number of suggestions one is able to
make
• Flexibility: number of times one shifts from one class of possible uses
to another
• Originality: how novel or unusual ideas are
Language as a system?
Language is a system of symbols that stand for or represent objects and ideas:
• A shared system of meaning used to communicate with others
• Easier to manipulate and convey meaning.
• Language and thought–thinking can take place without language, but
thinking relies heavily on language
• Helps us to form concepts through naming and classifying
perceptions
• The words we use affect meaning (and thought)
Thinking and Language: Cross-Cultural Studies –Linguistic determinism
• Developing particular words for an object or phenomenon enables the perception of differences, making distinctions, and categorizing information in ways that would not otherwise be possible.
In other words, we perceive the world
according to the framework conferred by our language.
• Sapir-Whorf documented a large number of words Eskimo have for ‘snow’.
• Also, the Native American Hopi do not distinguish between past, present, and future, as European languages do. He argues that this affects the perception of
time as circular and continuous
The structure of Language
• Phonemes: basic speech sounds
• Morphemes: speech sounds collected into meaningful units (syllables,
words)
• Grammar: a set of rules for combining words into sentences; syntax =
rules for word order
• Transformation rules: Noam Chomsky
- The dog bit the man
- The man was bitten by the dog
- The dog did not bite the man
- Did the dog bite the man?
- Language is productive – generates new thoughts and ideas.
- Language is not limited to speech: Gestural languages
problem-solving
- Mechanical solutions
- Heuristics
- Insightful solutions
- Common barriers to problem-solving
- Solutions by understanding
Mechanical solutions
• Mechanical solutions may be adequate for routine problems.
• These are achieved through:
Trial by error
By rote
Solutions by Understanding
• Understanding the problem implies gaining a deeper comprehension
of the problem.
• German psychologist Karl Duncker found this involved two phases:
• Discovering the general properties of a correct solution (the overall idea of what
is required to solve the problem but without specific detail)
• Then working on a functional solution with sufficient detail to guide further
action to solve the problem
Heuristic strategies
Heuristic refers to any strategy or technique that aids problem solving, especially
by limiting the number of possible solutions to be tried.
• A heuristic is a “rule of thumb” that reduces the number of alternatives to
consider
Some heuristic strategies
- Identify the way the current situation differs from your desired goal and identify the steps you need to take to reduce the difference.
- If you can’t get to the desired goal identify intermediary goals or subproblems to get you closer
- Try working backward from the desired goal to the starting point or current state
- Represent the problem in other ways e.g. with graphs, diagrams, or analogies
- Generate a possible solution and test it
Heuristic strategy: general thinking strategy
-5 steps aimed to achieve effective problem solving
- IDENTIFY: identify the problem
- DEFINE: define it clearly
- EXPLORE: Explore possible solutions and knowledge
- ACT: act by trying a possible solution or hypothesis
- LOOK: look at the results and learn from them
Insightful solutions
• Gaining insight – a solution appears suddenly and we wonder why we
didn’t see it before, a problem seen in a new way so that solution is
clear.
• Re-organise elements of a problem, selecting elements that are
relevant and ignoring those that are not
• Comparison of new problems with old information, information about
problems that have already been solved
Insightful solutions:
Three-process view by Robert Sternberg and Janet Davidson
Proposed that insight involves three abilities: • Selective coding • This refers to selecting information that is relevant to a problem while ignoring distractions.
- Selective combination
- Bringing together seemingly unrelated bits of useful information
- Selective comparison
- The ability to compare new problems with old information or with problems already solved.
Barriers to Problem-solving.
- Fixations: Functional fixedness: the inability to see new uses for familiar objects
- Emotional barriers – unable to solve problems because our emotions get in the way of thinking clearly. Inhibition, fear of making fool of self, fear of making mistake, excessive self-criticism, etc.
- Learned barriers – conventions about uses (Fixations, functional
fixedness) , possibilities, taboos - Perceptual barriers – sometimes we tend to see only one aspect of a
problem and ignore others - Cultural barriers – one culture may lead us to believe that reason and
logic are the best means to solving a problem and that fantasy and
play are a waste of time because their valued ethic is work.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
• Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to computer programs capable of
doing things that require intelligence when done by people.
• AI is based on the fact that many tasks – from harmonizing music to
medical diagnosis – can be reduced to a set of rules applied to a body of
information.
- AI is invaluable in situations where speed, vast memory, and persistence are required.
- Machine ‘intelligence’ is ultimately ‘blind’ outside its underlying set of rules. In contrast, human cognition is more flexible. Humans are able to take into account exceptions, context, and interpretations as they think.
Define intelligence
• In general, intelligence is the ability to act purposefully, to think
rationally and to deal effectively with the environment
• Intelligence also involves general mental abilities: Capacity to learn,
memory, ability to reason and solve problems, and successful
adaptation to environment
• Complex concept viewed differently
Many psychologists simply accept an operational definition of intelligence,
spelling out the procedures they use to measure it.
• By selecting test items a psychologist is saying in a very direct way ‘this is what I
mean by intelligence’
• By using the formal tests this justifies their operational definitions (functional issue,
often simply using what is available)
• Measuring intelligence
Using psychological tests
• Standardised measure of a person’s behavior
• Set procedures for administration and scoring
• Norms – how well you score relative to other people
• Reliable – consistently measures
• Valid – measures what it claims to measure
Mental age
• Mental age is based on the level of age-ranked questions a person can
answer.
• e.g. at ages 8/9 very few children can define the word ‘connection’
• At age 10, 10% can.
• At age 13, 60% can.
• Mental age is a good measure of actual ability. But mental age says nothing
about whether overall intelligence is high or low, compared with other
people of the same age.
• To find out what a particular mental age means, we must consider a
person’s chronological age. Then we can relate mental age to actual age.
• This yields an IQ or intelligence quotient.
• Notice that a person’s IQ will be 100 when mental age equals chronological
age.
Intelligence quotient
• MA (mental age) gives an indication of mental ability but does not provide
information regarding the functioning in comparison to people of
same chronological age
• IQ allows us to compare the test performance of people of different
ages
• MA (mental age) generally increases until 16 years and then remains on the same
level
• IQ stabilizes around 6 years of age
• Average IQ at any age is 10
Intellectual disability
Prevalence 1% of the population.
To assess for ID (intellectual disability)
• IQ less than 70
CATEGORIES of Intellectual disability: • Mild ID • Moderate ID • Severe ID • Profound ID • Assess adaptive behavior
Assess adaptive behavior.
• Assess adaptive behavior (a person’s ability to perform basic skills such as
dressing, eating, communicating, shopping, and working)
- Mild ID: can get through primary school then struggle, concrete topics
- Moderate ID: needs some supervision and then can take care of basic needs, engage in limited conversation
- Severe ID: need close supervision in all areas, recognizes people, gesture or broken language
- Profound ID: need constant care, communicate often through crying if has a need.
Causes of Intellectual disability
Causes: organic: fetal damage, birth trauma, metabolic disorders, genetic
abnormalities.
Intelligence theories
- Biological intelligence:
• Sir Francis Galton – believed that intelligence was hereditary
• Nature (inherited component of intelligence) vs nurture (effects of
the environment) - Intelligence as one general factor (g) or multiple factors
• Charles Spearman – general intelligence-based research on findings that there was a strong relation between performances on different intellectual tasks
• Gardner – multiple intelligences – defines intelligence in terms of
mental skills or abilities
Multiple intelligences
• Musical intelligence – composing, appreciating, and performing music
• Bodily-kinesthetic intelligence – the movement of the body or body
parts
• Logical-mathematical intelligence – logical reasoning, solving
problems and numerical calculation
• Linguistic intelligence – related to the expression and understanding
of language
- Spatial intelligence – for organizing things in space
- Interpersonal intelligence (emotional) – for getting on with people
• Intrapersonal intelligence – understanding ourselves and being in
touch with our feelings
• Naturalist intelligence
Intelligence: Hereditary vs environment
• People who are closely related obtain similar scores
on IQ tests
• People who are raised in similar environments obtain
similar scores on IQ tests
•Genetic potential is present at birth and
environmental factors activate this potential
Information processing approach
• Intelligence is based on three components – attentional processes, information
processes and planning processes
Robert Sternberg – 3 aspects of Intelligence
Componential intelligence - ways in which people process information
• Experiential intelligence – the way a person’s past experience contributes to
knowledge and skills that are applied in life situations
• Contextual intelligence – ability to adapt to real-world situations and
contexts
He believed that intelligence is a culturally defined concept
