1. Thinking, problem solving, and Language: What Humans Do Best
Copyright © 2011 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.

2. Mental Images: Representations of objects that are not present
Thinking
Manipulating mental representations of information to draw inferences and conclusions
Statue of Liberty
Mental Images: Representations of objects that are not present
Taste of Chocolate Milk
Thinking has two building blocks: Mental Images and Concepts.
Mental images are based on memory. Which hand is holding of the Statue of Liberty is holding the torch? (right)
Feeling of Wet Clothes on Your Skin

3. Two of the threes are backward. Which ones?
The one on the far left is easier because you only have to rotate it 60 degrees. The one in the middle typically takes most people longer to choose because you have to rotate it 180 degrees.

4. Thinking Prototype: Most typical instance of a particular concept
Concepts: Mental categories formed to group objects, events, or situations that share similar features
Concept: Vehicle, vacation, freedom
What we often do when categorizing objects is see whether the objects meet defining features of a concept. So, think of vehicle…we all think about cars, planes, trucks, buses, but what about sled, horse, skates, wheelbarrow. They don’t meet our prototype as neatly, so that do not immediately come to mind.
This also comes into play with less tangible concepts. Think about “illness” – describe that prototype. But does depression fit that? What about alcoholism? One reason that mental illness is not always taken seriously is because it does not fit neatly into our prototype of “illness”
Each time we encounter and categorize instances of a concept, we form a memory of that, which is called an exemplar. The wider the variety of exemplars, the easier it is to categorize new objects.
Exemplars: Memories of individual instances

5. Find a Prototype of a Cat

6. Which are Fruits?

7. More about Concepts
They are ideas…not the same as words or images, but they may be expressed as such.
Unambiguous; may be concrete or abstract.
Sometimes words mean more than one concept, and sometimes the same concept can be expressed in different words.
Sometimes more than one image can express the same concept.
The word “solution” is an example of a word that means more than one concept. The words couch and sofa convey the same concept.
Fruit can mean bananas, oranges, grapes, apples, etc. (More than one image can express the same concept.)
Prototypes and exemplars are processed in different portions of the brain.

8. Problem Solving
“A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?”
Take a minute to think about it … Do you have the answer? Many people respond by saying that the ball must cost 10 cents. Is this the answer that you came up with? Although this response intuitively springs to mind, it is incorrect. If the ball cost 10 cents and the bat costs $1.00 more than the ball, then the bat would cost $1.10 for a grand total of $1.20. The correct answer to this problem is that the ball costs 5 cents and the bat costs — at a dollar more — $1.05 for a grand total of $1.10.

9. Problem Solving
Six drinking glasses are lined up in a row. The first three are full of water; the last three are empty. By handling and moving only one glass, change the arrangement so that no full glass is next to another full one, and no empty glass is next to another empty one.
Pour the water in glass number 2 into glass number 5.

10. Problem Solving
Use the materials provided to mount the candle on the wall.

11. Problem Solving What does man love more than life
Fear more than death or mortal strife
What the poor have, the rich require,
And what contented men desire,
What the miser spends and the spendthrift saves
And all men carry to their graves?
Nothing

12. Problem Solving
Consider this rule about a set of cards that have letters on one side and numbers on the other. “If a card has a vowel on one side, then it has an even number on the other side.” Take a look at the cards below and tell me which cards I need to turn over to tell if this rule is actually true.
Turn over the E and 7 only. The puzzle states that a vowel must have an even number on the back side. It does not say that a consonant must have an odd number, and it doesn’t say that an even number must contain a vowel on the other side. That means that you don’t have to turn over the K or the 4 because what is on the back of those is irrelevant to what the puzzle asked you to do. You need to turn over the 7 to make sure it does NOT have a vowel on the other side. E K 4 7

13. Approaches to Problem Solving
Trial and Error – trying variety of solutions and eliminating those that do not work.
Algorithm – step-by-step method for solving a problem (following a formula)
Heuristic – rule of thumb strategy that may or may not work
Nothing
Insight – sudden realization of how to solve a problem.

14. Obstacles to Problem Solving
Mental Set: tendency to persist in solving problems with solutions that have worked in the past
Functional Fixedness—only viewing objects in the usual or customary way.
Extra brain activity is required to inhibit one way of viewing the problem and switch to another. Sometimes past experience actually hurts us in problem solving because we tend to hang onto doing something in a particular way.

15. Struggling against mental set
The equations on the board, expressed in Roman numerals, are incorrect. Your task is to transform each incorrect equation into a correct equation by moving ONE toothpick in each equation. The toothpick can only be moved once. Only Roman numerals and the three arithmetic operators ( +, -, = ) are allowed.

18. Creativity
--The ability to produce something original of high quality or to devise effective new ways to solve a problem.
--Only moderately correlated with IQ; more dependent on environment than genetics
More related to DIVERGENT than CONVERGENT thinking.
Convergent Thinking – narrowing potential solutions to the single best solution
Divergent Thinking – Expanding the number of possible solutions by thinking in novel ways

19. According to Sternberg: Creative People…
Adventuresome Personality
A Creative Environment
Have Expertise
Imaginative Thinking Skills
Intrinsic Motivation

20. Which is more dangerous?

22. Errors in Decision-Making (Tversky & Kahneman)
Availability Heuristic:
We estimate likelihood of an event on basis of how readily other instances of the event are in our minds.
When a rare event makes an impression on us, we overestimate its likelihood. Start seeing commercials of lottery winners, and it seems like we could actually win the lottery. Hearing accounts of missing, kidnapped children makes that seem more likely than it is.

23. Jack is a 45-year-old man. He is married and has 4 children
Jack is a 45-year-old man. He is married and has 4 children. He is generally conservative, careful, and ambitious. He shows no interest in political and social issues and spends most of his free time on his many hobbies, including home carpentry, sailing, and mathematical puzzles. Is Jack more likely to be an accountant or an engineer?
Jack is drawn from a sample of 100 men. 70 are accountants and 30 are engineers.

24. Errors in Decision-Making (Tversky & Kahneman)
Representativeness Heuristic:
We estimate likelihood of an event by comparing how similar it is to the prototype of the event.
Doing home carpentry and mathematical puzzles fits our engineer prototype better than accountant prototype, so we often ignore “base rate” or the numbers that do not fit with the prototypes. This is called the base rate fallacy.

25. Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright
Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. In college, she majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice and participated in antinuclear demonstrations .
Which is more probable?
Linda is a bank teller?
Linda is a bank teller and active in the feminist movement?

27. Errors in Decision-Making (Tversky & Kahneman)
Conjunction Fallacy
People estimate that the odds of two uncertain events happening together are greater than the odds of either even happening alone

28. Errors in Decision-Making
Overconfidence
Tendency to overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgements
False Consensus Bias
Tendency to overestimate how many people share your beliefs

29. Belief Perseverance – holding onto initial conceptions even after they have been discredited.
Confirmation bias
A bias to seek information that will confirm a rule and not to seek information that would refute the rule
Confirmation bias: A gun-control activist only reading and citing evidence in which people were killed with guns.

30. How we present an issue can sway our judgment or decision about it.
Gain-framed messages focus on the positive; loss-framed messages focus on the negative.
Framing Effects
90% will pass the exam. 10% of you will fail the exam.

31. If you were to ask people, “What characteristic most distinguishes humans from other living creatures?” most would reply “Language”.

32. Behaviorist approach: Skinner
Children learn language through imitation and reinforcement.
Correct meaning and pronunciation taught via operant conditioning.
As with most areas of psychology, there is a great debate about the key processes involved in language acquisition, specifically regarding the nature/nurture issue. These are three main approaches to language acquisition.
Being understood when you speak is reinforcing in itself, so children strive to master language to be understood.

33. Nativist theories: Chomsky
Inborn propensity to develop language.
Language Acquisition Device (LAD): innate mechanism that fosters facilitation of language.
Chomsky pointed out that children often make language mistakes that they don’t hear in adults and therefore cannot imitate. For example, the regular past tense ending in English is “ed”. Children often overregularize that rule and put ed on the end of other words such as “goed”, “eated” and “thinked”.
We are biologically equipped to speak just like birds are equipped to fly. Biggest support for this is that children reared in different home environments develop language at same pace and also that language development occurs so quickly in toddlers.
Also reinforcement does play a role, there is definite support that we are hard wired to recognize the sound patterns that make up human language.
Evidence: critical period for language development): Case of Genie. At age of 20 months, Genie was tied to a chair by her parents and kept in virtual isolation. Her father forbade Genie’s mother and brother to speak to her, and he himself only growled and barked at her. She remained in this brutal state until the age of Genie’s life improved after that, but it was too late for development of language. She developed basic vocabulary and could communicate her ideas, but did not learn grammar.

34. Bilingualism: acquisition of two languages
Advantages
Higher attention control
Better working memory
Better abstract reasoning
Can be protective against dementia
Disadvantages
Slightly slower processing speed and verbal fluency.
Nearly half of the world’s population is bilingual. But did you know that a number of laws and court rulings have reduced the availability of bilingual educational programs in many school systems? Why? Assumption that bilingualism hampers language development and has a negative impact on students’ educational progress. But there is no support for a negative effect on language development.
Once puberty is reached, acquiring a second language becomes more difficult. Work with fMRIs shows that acquiring a foreign language between ages of 1-5 results in different representation in brain than acquiring after age of 9.
Read section from Schacter text on bilingualism.
For bilingual people, their first and second languages are both active, and that creates language interference.

35. Linguistic relativity hypothesis (determinism): Whorf
One’s language determines the nature of one’s thought.
One big debate in psychology centers on whether language affects your thinking. Benjamin Whorf believed it did. He thought that different languages lead people to view the world differently. Looked to Eskimo example (50 words for snow)…believed that they actually PERCEIVED snow differently.
Mixed support. English speakers can differentiate between multiple types of snow even though they don’t have a word for it. But in some African cultures, languages do not have a boundary between blue and green, and this lack of distinction does seem to affect their color perception. So there is some true to the linguist relativity hypothesis.
Can be seen in bilingual people - will often switch language if native language doesn’t have the “right” word.
Also imagining an experience (outcome/process simulation) helps outcomes.
Linguistic influence now.

36. What makes language special?
Complexity
Reference to intangible concepts
We use language to categorize and think about things within our own heads.
Grammar: Set of rules that specify how units of language are combined to convey meaning
Does a honeybee say, “I’ll fly north today to find more honey to impress the queen?” Probably not.

37. Basic characteristics of language

38. Vocab Phoneme: smallest unit of sound
Morpheme: smallest meaningful unit of language
Syntactical rules: how words can be combined to form phrases and sentences
Morphological rules dictate how morphemes can be combined to form words. Some morphemes stand alone.

39. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
Meaning of language
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
Surface structure – how a sentence is worded
Deep structure – meaning of a sentence
“The dog chased the cat.” The cat was chased by the dog.’ Surface structure is different, but deep structure is the same. We begin with deep structure then create a surface structure to convey the meaning. After the deep structure is conveyed, the surface structure is forgotten (so we remember the gist of what was said).

40. Language acquisition
Birth – can distinguish between all speech sounds in the human language (lose this ability by 6 months).
Babbling (4-6 months) - combinations of vowels and consonants that sound like words, but are meaningless.
Receptive language - ability to understand what is said
Productive language – about to produce words
In Japanese, “l” and “r” fall within the same phoneme, but in English, they are different. Japanese infants can hear the difference, but Japanese adults cannot without practice.
Research – habituation. Plays a sound when suck on pacifier. Habituate after while, then play a new sound and suck again.
Parentese – infant-directed speech, distinct pronunciation, simplified vocab, short sentences, high pitch, and exaggerated expression (instinctive)
Even deaf infants babble, indicating it’s a natural part of language development, but they usually cease over time. Delayed/cessation of babbling is indicative of hearing problems. Deaf babies do babble with their hands if their parents use ASL.
15 different languages (English, Thai, Hindi, Japanese)…all prefer consonants made with lips, I and u less popular than o and a.

41. Language acquisition First Words (10-12 months)
Fast mapping – map a word onto concept after one exposure.
Telegraphic Speech (24 months)
Two word sentences
“More milk”, “Throw ball”, “Bye bye deer”
Tend to be within “function words”, such as prepositions or articles. Consist mostly of content words. Words do tend to be in correct syntax order (Throw ball, not ball throw), indicating that they are already understanding the rules.
There is a critical period for language development, as illustrated by tragic case of Genie. At the age of 20 months, Genie was tied to a chair by her parents and kept in virtual isolation. Her father forbade Genie’s mother and brother to speak to her and he himself only barked and growled at her. She remained in this brutal state until the age of 13. Her life improved substantially after that and she received years of language instruction, but it was too late. She developed a basic vocabulary and could communicate her idea, but could not grasp the grammatical rules of English. After the age of 7, it is very difficult to learn any language.
Overgeneralization – overusing grammatical rules (I runned, you eated). You can’t articulate the rules of your language, but innately know them.
Simple Sentences with Function Words (3 years)
Common mistake: Overgeneralization

42. Language and the brain
Wernicke’s Aphasia: Difficulty with speech comprehension
. Aphasia is difficulty producing or comprehending language. Broca’s and Wernicke’s Areas are located in left hemisphere.
Broca’s Aphasia: Difficulty with speech production

43. Language in other species (comparative cognition)
Most studies employ apes.
Apes can
Sizable vocab
Short sentences
Process complex sentences (receptive speech)
Apes cannot
Acquire almost unlimited vocab
Make grammatically complex sentences
More difficulty with abstract concepts (economics)
But what about dogs?