Cognition and Language

Cognition: thinking, gaining knowledge, and

dealing with knowledge

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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 .

C. Hierarchical Organization: in reference to cognitive

processes, information is organized based on a hierarchy of categories, subcategories, and shared features.

Things Living Things Non-Living Things Plants Animals Mammals Birds Reptiles Insects Sparrows Robins Hawks Canaries

D. Spreading Activation: when you hear about one concept,

the other concepts that you associate with it are also primed or activated

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II. Information Processing & Visual Cognition

A. Pre-attentive Process: allows one to find an unusual

feature or figure in that it stands out immediately without any shifting of attention.

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.

C. Stroop Effect…

D. Change Blindness: a failure to detect changes in parts of a

scene upon viewing it again.

E. Attentional Blink: during a brief time after perceiving one

stimulus, it is difficult to attend to something else

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(like an eye blink).

F. Selective Attention: when we intentionally shift our attention

to a particular stimulus.

III. Expertise

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

B. Studies show that expert abilities are most often the result of practice. C. Expert Pattern Recognition 1) Experts are especially good at looking at patterns and recognizing important features quickly.

IV. Problem-Solving & Associated Errors

A. Insight: when an answer or solution to a problem is

perceived to have been discovered without conscious effort.

B. Algorithm: a mechanical, repetitive, step-by-step procedure

for arriving at the solution to a problem

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

investigation

. D. Representativeness Heuristic: the tendency to assume that

if an item is similar to members of a particular category, it is also a member of the category

. 1) Base-Rate Information: the data about the frequency or probability of

a given item or event.

E. Availability Heuristic: the strategy of assuming that how

easily one can remember examples of an event is an indicator of how common that event actually is.

V. Other Common Problem-Solving Errors

A. Overconfidence Bias: our belief that our answers are more

accurate than they actually are.

B. Confirmation Bias: making mistakes due to a premature

commitment to an explanation or hypothesis instead of considering other possible explanations

. 1) Functional Fixedness: our tendency to adhere to a single

approach to a problem or a single way to use an item

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C. Attractiveness of valuable but very unlikely outcomes…

We will typically pick a slim chance of a big gain over a sure but small profit.

D. Framing Effect: our tendency to answer a question

differently when it is phrased differently.

E. Sunk Cost Effect:

our tendency to do something that we’d otherwise choose not to do, just because we spent the money to do it

.

F. Abstract versus Real-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 for

learning language.

2) Parentese: a slow and high-pitched method of

communication that may enhance early language learning

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H. Brain Damage and Language

1) Broca’s Aphasia: a condition characterized by inarticulate

speech and difficulties with both using and comprehending language.

2) Wernicke’s Aphasia: a condition marked by difficulty

recalling the names of objects and impaired comprehension of language

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I. Understanding Language J. Context…

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.