Week 12 Flashcards
What is common about language among humans
Every human group has language; human infants learn at least one language without being taught. Even children who don’t have much language to begin with are brought together, they can begin to develop and use their own language
common ground
A set of knowledge that the speaker and listener share and they think, assume, or otherwise take for granted that they share. It evolves as people take turns to assume the roles of speaker and listener, and actively engage in the exchange of meaning. helps people coordinate their language use
Audience design
Constructing utterances to suit the audience’s knowledge. If audiences are seen to be knowledgeable about an object, they tend to use a brief label of the object to help the audience understand their utterances
How do we achieve our conversational coordination
By virtue of our ability to ineractively align each other’s actions at different levels of language use; lexicon, syntax, as well as speech
How is language a cooperative activity
The number of people engaging in a conversation at a time is rarely more than 4. By some counts more than 90% of conversations happen in a group of four individuals or less. Coordinating conversation among four is not as difficult as coordinating conversation among 10
lexicon
Words and expressions
Syntax
Rules by which words are strung together to form sentences. When one person uses a certain expression to refer to an object in a conversation, others tend to use the same expression
What did Pickering and Garrod suggest
That interpersonal alignments at different levels of language use can activate similar situation models in the mind of those who are engaged in a conversation
Situation models
Representations about the topic of a conversation. You describe a situation using language, and many other aspects of language use converge.
Similar situation models
Begin to be built in everyone’s mind through the mechanism known as priming
Priming
Occurs when your thinking about one concept reminds you about other related concepts
Gossiping
The human equivalent of grooming. An act of socializing, signaling the importance of one’s partner. Allows humans to communicate and share their representations about their social world. They can regulate their social world-making more friends and enlarging one’s own group against other groups
ingroup
the group to which one belongs. Typically good, and if they do anything bad, that’s more an exception in special circumstances
Outgroup
More likely to one’s enemies. Typically bad, and if they do anything good, that’s more of an exception
How can someone’s action be described
By an action verb that describes a concrete action, a state verb that describes the actor’s psychological state, and adjective that describes the actor’s personality, or a noun that describes the actor’s role.
Linguistic intergroup bias
the tendency to communicate positive in-group and negative out-group behaviors more abstractly than negative in-group and positive out-group behaviors.
How can gossip spread through broader social networks
I If gossip is repeatedly transmitted and spread, it can reach a large number of people. When stories travel through communication chains, they tend to become conventionalized
What happens when people use language to describe an experience
Their thoughts and feelings are profoundly shaped by the linguistic representation that they have produced rather than the original experience per se
Sapir Whorf hypothesis
If a certain type of language use is repeated by a large number of people in a community, it can potentially have a significant effect on their thoughts and action
theory of mind
the human capacity to understand minds, a capacity that is made up of a collection of concepts and processes detection, imitation, empathy, perspective-taking
What interactions deeply rely on theory of mind?
Teaching another person new actions or rules by taking into account what the learner knows or doesn’t know, learning the words of a language by monitoring what other people attend to and are trying to do when they use certain words, figuring out our social standing by trying to guess what others think and feel, sharing experiences, collaborating on a task by signalling to one another that we share a goal
Describe some characteristics of how individuals diagnosed with autism differ in their processing of others’ minds
Some individuals with autism report that they perceive others “in a more analytical way. This mode of processing is very tiresome and slow
Mental processes underlying theory of mind
What underlies people’s capacity to recognize and understand mental states is a whole host of components-a toolbox, as it were, for many different but related tasks in the social world
Pyramid that reflects the complexity of involved processes
From simple and automatic on the bottom to complex and deliberate on the top. This organization also reflects development-from tools that infants master within the first 6-12 months to tools they need to acquire over the next 3-5 years. Reflects evolution
Agents category
Allows humans to identify those moving objects in the world that can act on their own. Features that even very young children take to be indicators of being an agent include being self-propelled, having eyes, and reacting systematically to the interaction partner’s behaviour, such as following gaze of imitating
Process of recognizing goals
Even before the end of their first year, infants recognize that humans reach toward an object they strive for even if that object changes location or if the path to the object contains obstacles
To act intentionally
Need the right kinds of beliefs about how to achieve the goal. The adult concept of intentionality requires that an agent have the skill to perform the intentioinal action in question
Imitation
The human tendency to carefully observe others’ behaviours and as they do-even if it is the first time the perceived has seen this behaviour.
Mimicry
A subtle, automatic form of imitation when people mutually mimic one another to reach a state of synchrony. Copying others’ behaviours, usually without awareness
Synchrony
Two people displaying the same behaviours or having the same internal states. Some research findings suggest that synchronizing is made possible by brain mechanisms that tightly link perceptual inforamtion with motor information ma
Automatic empathy
builds on imitation and synchrony in a clever way. A social perceiver unwittingly taking on the internal state of another person, usually because of mimicking the person’s expressive behaviour and thereby feeling the expressed emotion
How humans are capable of actively engaging with other people’s mental states
Two people attending to the same object and being aware that they are both attending to it
Visual perspective taking
Can refer to visual perspective taking or generally to effortful mental state inference. Evidence that we mentally “rotate” toward the other’s spatial location, because the farther away the person sits, the longer it takes to adopt the person’s perspective
A tool to understand the other’s thoughts or feelings
Simulation using one’s own mental states as a model for the others’ mental states. Can be an effective strategy if we share with the other person the same environment, background, knowledge, and goals, but it gets us into trouble when this presumed common ground is in reality lacking
Simulation
The process of representing the other person’s mental state
Projection
A social perceiver’s assumption that the other person wants, knows, or feels the same as the perceiver wants, kows, or feels
False belief test
An experimental procedure that assesses whether a perceiver recognizes that another person has a false belief- a belief that contradicts reality
People’s explanations of behaviour
People’s natural explanations for why somebody did something, felt something, etc
Older theories of how people explain and understand behaviour
Suggested that people merely identify causes of the behaviour. That is true for most unintentional behaviours. But to explain intentional behaviours, people use a more sophisticated framework of interpretation, which follows directly from their concept of intentionality and the associated mental states they infer
