Psychology Chapter 8 Outline:

Learning

I. Thinking
- Cognition
- All mental activities associated with processing, understanding, remembering, and
communicating.
- Known as thinking
- Cognitive Psychologists
- Study mental activities
- Logical and illogical ways we create concepts, solve problems, make decisions, and
form judgments.
A. Concepts
- Mental groupings of similar objects, events, and people.
- Word concepts are used to provide us with much information with less work.
- Chair sums up several different types of chairs.
- Without the word angry, we would have to describe facial expressions, gestures,
etc.
- Category Hierarchies
- We organize concepts into category hierarchies.
- Cab drivers divide organize their cities into sectors that divide into
neighborhoods.
- Development of Concepts
- We form some concepts with definition.
- Prototypes
- Mental images or best example of a category.
- To us, the robin fits more to our prototype of a bird then a goose.
- If something fails to our prototype, we will be slow to recognize it.

B. Solving Problems
- Algorithm
- Step-by-step procedure that guarantees an answer.
- Exhausts all possibilities before reaching a solution.
- Computers
- Unscrambling letters and possibilities of different words made.
- Heuristics
- Simple thinking strategies
- Allows us to make judgments and solve problems.
- Quicker than algorithm but easier to make mistakes.
- Insight
- Sudden novel realization of a solution to a problem.
- Contrasts with strategy-based solutions.
- Both humans AND animals have insight.
- Brain imagining and EEG studies show that when insight strikes, it activates the
right temporal cortex.
- Time between knowing and not knowing something is .03 seconds.
- Obstacles in Solving Problems
- Confirmation Bias
 - A tendency to search for information that confirms a personal bias.
- Wason’s research stated we seek evidence that will verify our ideas more
eagerly than we seek evidence that might prove them wrong.
- Business mangers will ore likely track the careers of their accomplished
employees than their rejected ones.
- Fixation
- Inability to see a problem from a new perspective.
- Mental Set
- Tendency to repeat solutions that worked in problems in the
past.
- Predisposes how we think.
- Functional Fixedness
- Tendency to think of things only in their usual functions.
- We’ll often look for a screwdriver when they can use a dime
C. Making Decisions and Forming Judgments
- When making decisions, we follow our intuition.
- Using and Misusing Heuristics
- Cognitive Psychologists identified two heuristics that help us decide
- Representativeness
- Judging the likelihood of things on how they represent or match prototypes.
- Person who reads and is slim is thought to be more likely to be a professor than
a truck driver
- He’s more likely to be a truck driver due to probably of getting the jobs.
- Availability
- Estimating the likelihood of events based on availability
in memory.
- If it comes to mind readily, then we think its more likely.
- Letter K comes more times as the third letter than
first.
- Overconfidence
- Tendency to overestimate the accuracy of our knowledge.
- More people would choose the well-known area
as the largest,
usually wrong.
- Exaggerated Fear
- Opposite of overconfidence that can cause fears that are not logical.
- After 9/11, people feared air travel.
- Framing Decision
- Decisions and judgments are affected depending on how issue is
framed
- Framing
- Way an issue is posed
- Customers will most likely buy “75% lean” then “25% fat”
D. Belief Bias
- Tendency for our beliefs to distort our logic.
- We see the illogical of conclusions that counter our beliefs.

- Belief Perseverance Phenomenon

- Tendency to hold on to our beliefs in the face of contradicting evidence
 - Does not stop us changing our beliefs.
- Once they form and justified, it takes more compelling evidence to change them.
- If a country is hostile, you’re liking to see their actions as hostile.
E. Stimulating Thinking and Artificial Intelligence
- Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- The science of designing and programming computers to do intelligent things and
to stimulate human though processes.
- Two facets
- Practical
- Includes Creation of industrial robots that can sense their
environment.
- Voice Recognition allows us to dictate letters to a computer.
- AI can allow a pilot to land ascend while flying.
- Theoretical
- Pioneered by Herbert Simon
- Studies how humans think using computer systems to mimic or rival human
thought processes.
- Computer Neural Networks
- Computer circuits that mimic the brain’s interconnected neural
cells.
- Performs tasks like learning to recognize visual patterns and
smells.

II. Language
- Our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we communicate with them
- Human essence
- The qualities of mind that are unique to humans.
A. Language Structure
- Phonemes
- The smallest distinctive sound unit.
- Bat and chat have 3 phonemes (B-A-T, Ch-A-T)
- Constant phonemes carry more information than vowel.
- People growing up learning one set of phonemes usually have difficulty pronouncing
those of another language.
- Morpheme
- Smallest unit that carries meaning
- Can be a word or part of a word
- Grammar
- System of rules that enables us to communicate with and understand others.
- Semantics
- Set of rules by which we derive meaning from morphemes, words, etc.
- Adding –ed to a word means it happened in the past tense.
- Syntax
- Rules for combining words into grammatically correct sentences.
- Adjectives come before nouns.

B. Language Development
- Children learn their native language before learning to add 2 and 2.
- We learn roughly 3,500 words a year.
 - We know 60,000 words by the time we graduate from High school.
- Acquiring Language
- By 4 months, children can read lips and discriminate speech
sounds.
- Babbling Stage
- At age 4, babies spontaneously utter variety of sounds.
- Not an imitation of adult speech
- 10 months they begin to listen to the language of household
- One Word
- The stage in speech development starting at 1 till 2 that the child speaks mostly in
single words.
- Two Word Stage
- Early speech stage where a child speaks in nouns and verbs.
- No Three-Word Stage
- After Two Word Stage, children begin uttering longer phrases.
- Explaining Language Development
- Operant Learning
- Skinner suggested language development would be explained on the principles of
association, imitation, and reinforcement.
- Inborn Universal Grammar
- Chomsky thought learning could not explain how fast the rate of language
acquisition was.
- Believed it to be in us since birth.
- Grammar was inborn no matter what language we learn.
- Statistical Learning
- Our brains discern word breaks by statistically analyzing which syllables go
together.
- Study of 2-year-old twins suggested genes affect speed of language learning.
- First seven years are critical to learning.
- Vocabulary and language are learned much more quickly.
- Learning a new language gets harder with age.

III. Thinking and Language

A. Language Influences Thinking
- Linguistic Determinism
- Whorf’s hypothesis that language determines the way we think.
- If no past tense were used, people would not think about the past
- Bilinguals have a different sense of self
- Different personalities while speaking different languages.
- Words don’t necessarily determine the way we think, but influence.
- New words lead to new ways of thinking
- Bilingual children pay attention better.

B. Thinking Without Language

- Procedural Memory
- A mental picture of how you do it.
- Baseball players improved by 15% after practicing with mental practice.

IV. Animal Thinking and Language

A. Do Animals Think?
- Animals, especially apes, display capacities for thinking.
- Monkey was able to learn to touch pictures by numerical order.
- Can use joysticks to collect number of dots.
- Chimpanzees show insightful behavior when solving problems.
- Reinforcement was used in order to get the chimps to use a longer stick to get food.
- At least 39 local customs related to chimp use.
- Animals do not have a “Theory of Mind”
- Primates are capable of self-recognition and of comprehending other’s perceptions.
B. Do Animals Exhibit Language?
- Animals communicate!
- Vervet monkeys have different alarm sounds for different predators.
- Honeybees communicate by dancing.
- The Case of the Apes
- Chimps lack vocal apparatus for human-like speech
- Trained to use sign language.
- Gardner taught Washoe 182 signs before death.
- Speech possibly evolved from gestures.
- But Can Apes Really Talk?
- Apes required their vocabulary through great difficulty.
- Apes do actions in return for a reward like pigeons did.
- Much of chimp signing is nothing more than apes aping their trainer’s signs.
- Apes use signs meaningfully but lack syntax.

Ivan Moutinho Period 4