Cognition and Language

Cognition: thinking, gaining knowledge, and dealing with knowledge.

I. Categorization

A. Categorization: in general, we categorize people, objects, or events together when they have important qualities in common.

B. Prototype: a familiar or typical example of a category.

Things

Non-LivingThingsLiving Things

Plants Animals

InsectsReptilesBirdsMammals

CanariesHawksRobinsSparrows

C. Hierarchical Organization: in reference to cognitiveprocesses, information is organized based on a hierarchy of categories, subcategories, and shared features.

D. Spreading Activation: when you hear about one concept, the other concepts that you associate with it are also primed or activated.

C. Stroop Effect…

B. Attentive Process: allows one to find a typical feature or figure. It is a procedure that considers only one part of the visual field at a time.

A. Pre-attentive Process: allows one to find an unusual feature or figure in that it stands out immediately without any shifting of attention.

II. Information Processing & Visual Cognition

D. Change Blindness: a failure to detect changes in parts of a scene upon viewing it again.

F. Selective Attention: when we intentionally shift our attentionto a particular stimulus.

E. Attentional Blink: during a brief time after perceiving one stimulus, it is difficult to attend to something else.(like an eye blink).

III. Expertise

A. Our first inclination is to attribute expert abilities tospecial, inborn talents.

B. Studies show that expert abilities are most often theresult of practice.

C. Expert Pattern Recognition 1) Experts are especially good at looking at patterns andrecognizing important features quickly.

D. Representativeness Heuristic: the tendency to assume thatif an item is similar to members of a particular category, it is alsoa member of the category.

1) Base-Rate Information: the data about the frequency or probability of a given item or event.

C. Heuristics: strategies for simplifying a problem or guiding an investigation.

IV. Problem-Solving & Associated Errors

B. Algorithm: a mechanical, repetitive, step-by-step procedurefor arriving at the solution to a problem.

A. Insight: when an answer or solution to a problem isperceived to have been discovered without conscious effort.

E. Availability Heuristic: the strategy of assuming that howeasily one can remember examples of an event is an indicatorof how common that event actually is.

A. Overconfidence Bias: our belief that our answers are moreaccurate than they actually are.

B. Confirmation Bias: making mistakes due to a prematurecommitment to an explanation or hypothesis instead ofconsidering other possible explanations.

1) Functional Fixedness: our tendency to adhere to a singleapproach to a problem or a single way to use an item.

C. Attractiveness of valuable but very unlikely outcomes…We will typically pick a slim chance of a big gain over a surebut small profit.

V. Other Common Problem-Solving Errors

D. Framing Effect: our tendency to answer a questiondifferently when it is phrased differently.

E. Sunk Cost Effect: our tendency to do something that we’dotherwise choose not to do, just because we spent the moneyto do it.

F. Abstract versusReal-World Reasoning

VI. Language

A. Communicative Productivity: humans can express new ideas through language.

B. Transformational Grammar: a system of converting a deep structure (the underlying logic or meaning of a sentence) into a surface structure (the actual words chosen to express).

C. Inferences: logical assumptions made possible by information in memory.

D. Spoonerism: an exchange of the initial sounds of two or more words in a phrase or sentence.

E. Linguistic Relativity: the hypothesis that the structure of a spoken language influences how a speaker of that language thinks about and perceives the world.

F. Animal Language

G. Human Specializations for Learning Language 1) Language Instinct: a built-in, brain based mechanism forlearning language.

2) Parentese: a slow and high-pitched method ofcommunication that may enhance early language learning.

H. Brain Damage and Language

1) Broca’s Aphasia: a condition characterized by inarticulatespeech and difficulties with both using and comprehendinglanguage.

2) Wernicke’s Aphasia: a condition marked by difficultyrecalling the names of objects and impaired comprehensionof language.

K. Word-Superiority Effect: people are generally better at recognizing individual letters when they are a part of a word rather than when they are standing alone or with a nonsense cluster.

I. Understanding Language

J. Context…