1. Cognitive and Affective Bases of Behavior
Problem Solving

2. Enter question text...
Enter answer text... 30
180

3. Insight in a Small Dose Koehler and his insightful ape, Sultan
Initial work
Impasse
Aha!
Nonverbal in nature?

4. Incremental Problem Solving

5. Syllogism Syllogism Categorical Syllogism
Two statements called premises
Third statement called conclusion
Categorical Syllogism
Describe relation between two categories using all, no, or some

6. Alice is an elephant. All elephants are pink. Alice is therefore pink.
Strongly Agree
Agree
Disagree
Strongly Disagree

7. Deductive Reasoning
Syllogism is valid if conclusion follows logically from its two premises
Aristotle’s “perfect” syllogism
Premise 1: All A are B
Premise 2: All B are C
Conclusion: Therefore, All A are C
If two premises of a valid syllogism are true, the syllogism’s conclusion must be true.
Do not confuse “validity” with “truth”

8. Common Biases
Atmosphere effect: use of words all, some, or no
Belief bias: if syllogism is true or agrees with a person’s beliefs, more likely to be judged valid

9. The Wason 4 Card Problem
Effect of using real-world items in a conditional-reasoning problem
Determine minimum number of cards to turn over to test: If there is a vowel on one side, then there is an even number on the other side.

10. Four Cards

11. Falsification
Falsification principle: to test a rule, you must look for situations that falsify the rule
Most participants fail to do this
When problem is stated in concrete everyday terms, correct responses greatly increase

12. Pragmatic Permission
Pragmatic reasoning schema: thinking about cause and effect in the world as part of experiencing everyday life
Permission schema: if A is satisfied, B can be carried out
Used in the concrete versions
People are familiar with rules

13. An Error on Baker Street
“There has been murder done, and the murderer was a man. He was more than six feet high, wore coarse, square-toed boots and smoked a Trinchopoly cigar. He came here with his victim in a four-wheeled cab, which was drawn by a horse with three old shoes and one new on his off fore-leg. In all probability he had a florid face, and the finger-nails of his right hand were remarkably long”
- A. Conan Doyle, 1887, A Study in Scarlet

14. Inductive Reasoning
Premises are based on observation and we generalize from these cases to more general conclusions with varying degrees of certainty
Strength of argument
Representativeness of observations
Number of observations
Quality of observations

15. Why Induce? Used to make scientific discoveries Used in everyday life
Hypotheses and general conclusions
Used in everyday life
Make a prediction about what will happen based on observation about what has happened in the past

16. Heuristics
Availability heuristic: events more easily remembered are judged as being more probable than those less easily remembered
Illusory correlations: correlation appears to exist, but either does not exist or is much weaker than assumed
Stereotypes

17. Keeping up With the Heuristics
Representativeness Heuristic: the probability that A comes from B can be determined by how well A resembles properties of B
Use base rate information if it is all that is available
Use descriptive information if available and disregard base rate information
Conjunction rule: probability of two events cannot be higher than the probability of the single constituents

18. Heuristics
Law of large numbers: the larger the number of individuals randomly drawn from a population, the representative the resulting group will be of the entire population (we tend to assume that small numbers are representative)
The Confirmation Bias: tendency to selectively look for information that conforms to our hypothesis and overlook information that argues against it

19. Similarity-Coverage
Goal: explain how people’s conceptions of different categories influence the strength of arguments
Principle of typicality: argument with most typical example of a category in the premise is the strongest
Principle of diversity: argument with greatest coverage of a category is stronger

20. Influencing A Decision
Decisions depend on how choices are presented
Opt-in procedure
active step to be organ donor
Opt-out procedure
Organ donor unless request not to be
Risky decisions
Risk-aversion strategy used when problem is stated in terms of gains
Risk-taking strategy when problem is stated in terms of losses
Framing effect: decisions are influenced by how a decisions is stated
Can highlight one aspect of situation

21. The Prefrontal Cortex
Important for reasoning, planning, and making connections among different parts of a problem or story
As reasoning problems become more complex, larger areas of the PFC are activated
Damgage:
Interferes with ability to act in a flexible manner (important for problem solving)
Perseveration: cannot switch from one pattern of behavior to another

22. Cognitive and Affective Bases of Behavior
Language

23. Two Important Concepts in Language
Creativity
Generativity

24. Language is a uniquely human trait
Strongly Agree
Agree
Disagree
Strongly Disagree 10

25. The Universality of Language
Languages are “unique but the same”
Different words, sounds, and rules
All have nouns, verbs, negatives, questions, past/present tense

26. The Creativity of Human Language
Governed by rules
Specify ways components can be arranged

27. Components of Language
Semantics: meanings of words and sentences
Syntax: rules for combining words into sentences

28. Developing Language Born making noise 6 mos – babbling
WAUGH!
6 mos – babbling
1st year – overgeneralizing first “words”
18 mos – 2 word utterances
Qualifiers emerge
Telegraphic speech
Stress is used in place of prepositions
6 – mastered most of the language
2 -10 years as the “optimal window” for learning language
Also best time to recover from aphasia-inducing damage

29. Language as Inherited Noam Chomsky (1957) Syntactic Structures
Human language coded in the genes
Underlying basis of all language is similar

30. Nim Chimpsky

31. Language Creativity Noam Chomsky (1959)
Children produce sentences they have never heard and that have never been reinforced

32. Perceiving and Understanding Words
Lexicon: all words a person understands
Phoneme: shortest segment of speech that, if changed, changes the meaning of the word
Morphemes: smallest unit of language that has meaning or grammatical function

33. Hooked on Phonemes Phonemic Restoration Effect
“fill in” missing phonemes based on context of sentence and portion of word presented

34. Strongly Agree Agree Disagree Strongly Disagree
I’ve frequently accidientally substituted words or switched consonants in a sentence.
Strongly Agree
Agree
Disagree
Strongly Disagree

35. Rev. W. A. Spooner Phoneme exchanges Word exchanges
Consonant-vowel rule
Word exchanges
Syntactic-category rule

36. Ms. Malaprop Word Substitution Structure of language
Person’s prior knowledge

37. Culture, Language, & Cognition
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: language influences thought

38. Green sleep gets cat on the tomato with the snarp. Now.
Wernecke’s aphasia (red)
Word salad
Difficulty understanding others
Word comprehension areas damaged
Broca’s aphasia (green)
Understandable
Slow, laborious, telegraphic
Word generation areas damaged

39. 10 Morpheme Syntax Phoneme Lexicon
The smallest unit of language that has meaning or grammatical function is…
Morpheme
Syntax
Phoneme
Lexicon 10

40. “If you study hard, then you might get an A on the quiz” is an example of:
Stepwise heuristic
Pragmatic reasoning schema
Falsification principle
Inductive reasoning 10

41. Questions? Thoughts?