4 th Edition Copyright 2004 Prentice Hall8-1 Thinking, Language, and Intelligence Chapter 8
Copyright 2004 Prentice Hall8-2 Thinking Cognitive psychology is the study of thinking. Thinking involves manipulation of information that can take the form of images or concepts. Visual imagery is the experience of seeing without the object or event actually being viewed.
Copyright 2004 Prentice Hall8-3 Thinking Concepts are mental representations that facilitate thinking and reduce the number of elements we must consider. Concepts may be defined by their properties. We usually identify specific examples as members of a concept by judging their degree of similarity to a prototype, or best example, of the concept.
Copyright 2004 Prentice Hall8-4 Thinking An algorithm is a method of solving problems that involves systematically exploring all possible solutions until the correct one is reached. Algorithms can be time-consuming and do not work for problems that are not clearly defined. Heuristics are educated guesses or rules of thumb that are used to solve problems. Although the use of heuristics does not guarantee a solution, it is more time-efficient than using algorithms.
Copyright 2004 Prentice Hall8-5 Thinking Try the nine dot problem! Connect the nine dots without lifting your pencil from the paper
Copyright 2004 Prentice Hall8-6 Thinking Rigidity is the tendency to rely on past experiences to solve problems. One form of rigidity, functional fixedness, is the inability to use familiar objects in new ways. Likewise, set effect predicts that we will attempt to use solutions that have been successful in the past, even when they are not the most effective.
Copyright 2004 Prentice Hall8-7 Thinking Now try this problem
Copyright 2004 Prentice Hall8-8 Thinking The way in which information is presented can dramatically alter our decision making; this effect is called framing.
Copyright 2004 Prentice Hall8-9 Thinking We also make decisions by comparing the information we have received to some standard. Heuristics facilitate good decisions but may sometimes result in bad ones.
Copyright 2004 Prentice Hall8-10 Thinking Creativity depends on divergent thinking, rather than the convergent thinking assessed in tests of intelligence. Creative people have a high capacity for hard work, a willingness to take risks, and a high tolerance for ambiguity and disorder.
Copyright 2004 Prentice Hall8-11 Thinking The business community is interested in enhancing creativity to develop and market products and services. The methods used to enhance creativity include engaging in humorous and playful activities.
Copyright 2004 Prentice Hall8-12 Thinking Which would you judge to be creative
Copyright 2004 Prentice Hall8-13 Language Between birth and the beginning of formal schooling, children learn to speak and understand language. Phonemes are the individual sounds of a language; morphemes are its smallest meaning-bearing elements. An understanding of the proper order of words in phrases and sentences demonstrates an understanding of syntax
Copyright 2004 Prentice Hall8-14 Language There are two major theories of language acquisition: –the notion that language is a learned response acquired like any other behavior –and the view that children are innately predisposed to acquire language through a built-in language acquisition device (LAD)
Copyright 2004 Prentice Hall8-15 Language The linguistic relativity hypothesis suggests that our use of words (and syntax) can influence and even guide thought processes.
Copyright 2004 Prentice Hall8-16 Intelligence Francis Galton initiated the intelligence testing movement by developing tests based on the assumption that level of intelligence is related to sensory abilities.
Copyright 2004 Prentice Hall8-17 Intelligence Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon developed an intelligence test to evaluate French schoolchildren. They proposed the concept of mental age which compared a child's performance with the average performance of children at a particular age. The intelligence quotient (IQ) is the ratio of mental age divided by chronological age and multiplied by 100.
Copyright 2004 Prentice Hall8-18 Intelligence Binet's tests became the widely used Stanford-Binet test. Another set of tests, the Wechsler Scales, yield verbal and performance appraisals of Intelligence.
Copyright 2004 Prentice Hall8-19 Intelligence The three characteristics of a good psychological test are reliability, validity, and standardization. Reliability refers to the consistency of scores obtained on repeated administrations of the test. Validity refers to a test's ability to measure what it was designed to measure.
Copyright 2004 Prentice Hall8-20 Intelligence Standardization refers to uniformity in testing procedures and test scoring. Norms provide the distribution of scores of a large sample of people who have previously taken a test.
Copyright 2004 Prentice Hall8-21 Intelligence Intelligence test scores are distributed in the shape of a bell curve. The majority of the scores are clustered around the middle, with fewer scores found at either extreme.
Copyright 2004 Prentice Hall8-22 Intelligence According to Charles Spearman, we all possess general intelligence (along with specific abilities. Robert Sternberg and Howard Gardner propose that we have several types of intelligence, most of which are not measured by current intelligence tests.
Copyright 2004 Prentice Hall8-23 Intelligence The heritability of intelligence is an estimate of the influence of heredity in accounting for differences among people. The heritability of intelligence tends to increase with age
Copyright 2004 Prentice Hall8-24 Intelligence Yet, even clearly inherited conditions, such as PKU, can be modified by altering a person's environment. Correlations between the IQ scores of identical twins suggest that intelligence is strongly influenced by heredity.
Copyright 2004 Prentice Hall8-25 Intelligence The closer the family relationship, the higher the correlation between the intelligence scores of family members. Studies of adopted children suggest that environmental factors also have an effect on intelligence.
Copyright 2004 Prentice Hall8-26 Intelligence Claude Steele has offered evidence that when taking standardized tests, African Americans may experience stereotype vulnerability. This notion suggests that something as simple as a question about one's race may have more significant meaning to African Americans than to other people.