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C10:1
Myers’ PSYCHOLOGY
Chapter 10
Thinking and Language
C10:2
Outline
• Thinking- Concepts
- Solving Problems
- Making Decisions• Thinking about risk
- Belief Bias
• Language
- Language Structure
- Language Development
• Thinking and Language
- Language Influences Thinking
- Thinking in Images
• Animal Thinking and Language
- Do animals think?
- Do animals exhibit language?
- The Case of the Apes
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Thinking
• Cognition- Mental activity associated with processing, understanding, and communicating information
• Cognitive Psychology- Study of these mental activities includes
• Concept formation
• Problem solving
• Decision making
• Judgement formation
- Study of both logical and illogical thinking
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Concepts• Concepts are mental groupings of similar objects, events, or people- Many important concepts have labels (names)
• Some concrete: ball, chair, shirt, robin, …
• Some abstract: angry, freedom, government, …
• Various ways to represent meaning- Definitions: necessary and sufficient conditions
• Triangle is 3-sided closed geometric form
• Applies to few natural concepts (e.g., chair, bird)
- Hierarchical relations (e.g., Dog is an Animal, Robin is a Bird) or Associative / Semantic networks (+1)
- Prototype: suggested by much psychological research• Best or Average example of category
• Matching new items to prototype provides quick and easy way to assign new items to category; e.g., compare new feathered creature to prototypical bird, such as a robin (+2)
C10:5Semantic Network C10:6Concept and Prototype
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C10:7• Categorization- Can lead to distorted memories
• Morphed Caucasian / Asian faces (below): intermediate faces remembered as more CA/AS prototypical
• Eyewitness may remember face classified as Black as darker than it actually was
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Solving Problems
• Trial and Error- E.g., left
• Algorithms (+2)- Methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving particular problem
• Heuristics (+2)- Rule-of-thumb strategy that often allows us to solve problems efficiently
- Usually faster than algorithms, but more error-prone
- Sometimes unaware of using heuristics
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ThinkingUnscramble
S P L O Y O C H Y G• Algorithm- All 907,208 combinations
- Exist (or feasible) only for well-defined problems
• Heuristic- Throw out all YY combinations. Others?
- Blackjack: take another card if less than 15
- Chess: control 4 center squares, castle early, …
- General: find analogy to another problem (+1)
C10:11Analogy Heuristic
• To solve novel problem, try to find analogy (parallels) to other problem(s)- A patient has cancerous tumor. Beams of radiation will destroy tumor, but in high doses also destroys healthy tissue surrounding tumor. How can you use radiation to safely eradicate tumor?• 10% solved without analogy
- Fortress surrounded by moat is connected to land by numerous narrow bridges. An attacking army successfully captures fortress by sending few soldiers across each bridge, converging upon it simultaneously.• 30% solution given this analogy
• 75% if told to relate two scenarios
C10:12Thinking: Insight
• Insight (+1)
- Sudden, often novel realization of solution to problem
- Contrasts with strategy-based solutions
- Wolfgang Kohler’s experiments on insight by chimpanzees (below)
- Associated with Right Temporal Lobe Activity (left)
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Insight Problem• Person wants to make one continuous circle of 12 links out of 4 3-link chains
• Costs 3 cents to separate a link and 2 cents to close again
• Person only has 15 cents
• Can it be done? If so, how?
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Obstacles to Problem Solving
• Many insight problems difficult to solve because some mental obstacle or barrier to overcome
- Several discussed here and in following sections
• Fixation
- Fail to see problem from new perspective (e.g., eliminate one chain)
- Common barrier to problem solving
- Various kinds of fixation illustrated in next few problems
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The Matchstick Problem
• How would you arrange six matches to form four equilateral triangles?
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The Three-Jugs Problem
Problem A B C
Given jugs of sizes: Measure out
this much water:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
21 127 3
14 46 5
18 43 10
7 42 6
20 57 4
23 49 3
15 39 3
100
22
5
23
29
20
18
C10:19Problem Solving
•Mental Set- Tendency to approach problem in particular way, especially way that succeeded in past
- But may not help solve new problem, or may be less efficient (as in “formula”approach for jug problems 6 and 7)
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The Candle-Mounting Problem
• Using these materials, how would you mount candle on bulletin board?
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Problem Solving
•Functional Fixedness
-Tendency to think of things only in terms of usual function(s)
- Impedes problem solving when need to think about object serving unique functions (i.e., in new, creative way)
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C10:23Another kind of Obstacle
• Confirmation Bias
- Tendency to search for (and remember) information that confirms our preconceptions
- Wason card problem
• There are 4 cards with following on up side
E K 4 7
• Which cards must you turn over to determine whether the following rule is true?
• Rule: If vowel on one side, then even number on other
- Given opportunity to learn more about someone given prior information, we tend to ask questions consistent with initial information (e.g., extrovert, introvert)
- Contributed to US government belief that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction
C10:24Making Decisions
- Another type of thinking is Making Decisions and Forming Judgments
- As with problem solving, people often hindered by certain cognitive flaws in their thinking
• Using and Misusing Heuristics- Representativeness Heuristic
• Rule of thumb for judging likelihood of things in terms of how well they seem to represent, or match, particular prototypes
• May lead one to ignore other relevant information, such as Base Rate (+1)
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• Tversky & Kahneman’s “poetry reading truck driver”
- Is “short, slim person who likes to read poetry more likely to be professor of classics at Ivy League University or truck driver?”
- Most people choose professor, but
- Only 40 or so professors of classics at Ivy League schools, and perhaps half short and slim = 20 candidates
- 400,000 truck drivers, 1/8 slim = 50,000, 1/100 read poetry = 500 candidates
- Therefore, much more likely to be truck driver
C10:26Representativeness Heuristic
- Which of following sequences of births of Boys (B) and Girls (G) is most likely at Health Sciences Center?
• 1. BBBBBB
• 2. BGGBGB
• 3. BBBGGG
• 4. BGBGBG
- People tend to pick 2 although all equally likely
- 2 is more representative (typical) of our impression of random sequence of births
C10:27Making Decisions
• Availability Heuristic- Estimate likelihood of events based on availability in memory
- If instances come readily to mind (perhaps because of vividness), we presume such events are common
• Example 1: airplane crash, but much more likely to die in motor vehicle accident
• Example 2: more words with r at beginning or as 3rd
letter?
- Contributes to people’s mistaken judgments about risk of various activities (+1)
C10:28The Fear Factor – Do We Fear the Right Things?
• Factors that contribute to fear, often mistaken
- Availability: plane crash memorable (right)
- What we do not control: flying vs. driving
- Biological Preparedness (Learning): height
- Immediacy
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C10:29Making Decisions
• Overconfidence- People tend to be more confident than warranted that they are correct
- Overestimate accuracy of our beliefs and judgments
- e.g., most people believe they are in top 25% of drivers
- e.g., students under-estimate amount of time to complete assignments
- Leads to premature termination of evidence gathering
C10:30
Making Decisions
• Framing- The way issue is posed
- How issue is framed can affect decisions and judgements
• e.g.: What is best way to market ground beef: 25% fat or 75% lean?
• Two identical quantitatively, but 2nd probably more “attractive” to consumers
• 2nd example (+1)
C10:31A Second Framing Example
• Suppose you have serious disease that needs to be treated with medication. Your risk of dying over next year is 10% if you don't receive treatment.
• There are only 2 possible medications for disease: Medications A and B. Cost about same and almost no side effects.
- Medication A: If you take medication it will decrease your risk of dying by 80% (four-fifths) over next year.
- Medication B: If 100 people with disease, like you, take this medication, 8 deaths can be prevented over next year.
- Which medication do you want? (Pick one answer.)
• 1. Medication A
• 2. Medication B
• 3. Either Medication A or B
• 4. Can't decide.
C10:32Belief Bias
• Belief Bias- Tendency for preexisting beliefs to distort logical reasoning
- Makes invalid conclusions seem valid, or valid conclusions seem invalid
- Consider following two syllogisms• Democrats support free speech. Dictators are not democrats. Dictators do not support free speech.
• Robins have feathers. Chickens are not robins. Chickens do not have feathers.
C10:33Belief Bias
• Belief Perseverance- Clinging to initial conceptions after basis on which they were formed discredited
- Important to consider opposite outcome to that which supports our beliefs
- Should be cautious in justifying (i.e., explaining) why our beliefs are correct
- Ross, Lepper, and Hubbard (1975): Subjects examined suicide notes to determine which were real. A third each of participants told they were right 10, 17, or 24 out of 25 times. Then told they had been lied to and asked to estimate more correctly. Those who had been told higher numbers continued to guess high.
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Outline
• Thinking
- Concepts
- Solving Problems
- Making Decisions• Thinking about risk
- Belief Bias
• Language- Language Structure
- Language Development
• Thinking and Language
- Language Influences Thinking
- Thinking in Images
• Animal Thinking and Language
- Do animals think?
- Do animals exhibit language?
- The Case of the Apes
C10:36Language• Language
- Spoken, written, or gestured words and way people combine them to communicate meaning; complex process (below)
- Approximately 6,000 languages, although not all viable because of few speakers
• Language Structure- Hypothesized to involve 3 (or 4) sub-systems: Phonetics, Syntax, Semantics, Pragmatics
C10:37Phonetics• Concerns sounds of
language
• Phoneme
- Smallest distinctive sound unit in spoken language
- About 40 or so phonemes in English (right)
- Regularities of which people not always aware
• Compare p t k and b d g (+1)
• Categorical perception (+2)
- Mature adults often have difficulty with distinctive sounds in other languages (but see later graph for children)
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C10:39 C10:40Syntax
• Rules to combine words into grammatically sensible sentences in given language
• Grammar
- System of rules in language that enables us to communicate with and understand others
- Fundamental work done by linguist Noam Chomsky
• Postulated abstract rules to account for structure of language (+1)
• Not formal rules taught as grammar in school: Most syntactic rules
learned implicitly as children, but different story for adults (see later slide on development of grammar)
- Able to explain certain features of human language
• Distinguished Deep vs. Surface structures: e.g., “The boy kissed the girl” and “The girl was kissed by the boy” have different surface
structures but same deep structure
• Ambiguous sentences differ at Deep Structure level (+2 +3)
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Chomsky’s Phrase Structure GrammarC10:42
C10:43 C10:44Semantics
• Set of rules by which people derive meaning from words and sentences- Also study of meaning
• Morpheme- Smallest unit that carries meaning in language- May be word or part of word, such as prefix or suffix in English (other languages have more ways to transform morphemes)• Boys = Boy + s (plural) = 2 morphemes
• Looked = Look + ed (past) = 2 morphemes
• Explaining meaning- Prototypes, Associative / Semantic networks (see concepts section)
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Pragmatics
• Study use of language in context• Includes traditional nonverbal communication- Gestures, non-speech sounds, body language, …
• Other non-verbal aspects of speech- Turn-taking: wait for pause or invitation to speak- Relevance: don’t respond with content unrelated to what is being said
- Indirect speech acts: “Can you stop fidgeting?” Is this a question, a request, a criticism, …?
- Nonliteral aspects of speech: Metaphor, Irony, Jokes, …
- Much communication nonverbal (+1)
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Language DevelopmentC10:48• Babbling Stage
- Begins at 3 to 4 months
- Infant spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to household language
• One-Word Stage
- From about 1 to 2 years
- Stage during which child speaks mostly in single words
- Rapid growth in vocabulary (+1, +2)
Language Development
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Language Development
• Two-Word Stage
- Begins about age 2
- Stage during which child speaks mostly two-word statements
• Telegraphic Speech- Child speaks like telegram – “go car” – using mostly nouns and verbs and omitting “auxiliary”words
• Mean Length of Utterance (+1)- Increases dramatically after 1.5 – 2.5 years, with marked variability between children
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Language Development
- Several interesting effects during language development
• Over-generalization- Tendency to apply rules where they may not occur in language
- e.g., irregular past tense of verbs; child may say “goed” instead of “went”
• Importance of exposure to language models- e.g., discrimination of speech sounds in different languages (+1 +2)
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Language Development
• All born able to recognize speech sounds from all languages
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
Percentage
able todiscriminate
Hindi t’s
Hindi-speaking
adults
6-8 months
8-10months
10-12months
English-speaking
adults
Infants from English-speaking homes
C10:55Language Development: Phoneme Perception
• Werker & Desjardins (1995)
- Infants raised in English (E) or Hindi (H) speaking homes
- Reinforced head turn paradigm
- Tested at 6 and 12 months
0
20
40
60
80
100
H-6m E-6m H-12m E-12m
% correct
C10:56Language Development• Much controversy over mechanisms by which language acquired: Nativist-Empiricist contrast
- Skinner: learning mechanisms
- Chomsky: innate hard-wired brain mechanisms (Inborn Universal Grammar, Language Acquisition Device or LAD)
- Cognitive neuroscientists: statistical learning of regularities based on experience
• Composite model may ultimately emerge (+1)
- Both Heredity and Environment Important
• Evidence
- Correlation between complexity of mother and child speech (+2): Genes or Modeling?
- Age of exposure to language in bilinguals (+3)
- Critical periods and feral children (+4 to +5)
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Language Development• Genes design mechanisms for language, and experience activates them as it modifies brain
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Correlation of Mother and Child Speech
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Language Development
• New language learning harder with age
• Critical period(s) during which exposure to language is important (essential?)
• Feral children fail to acquire normal language
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Case Studies: Isolated and Feral Children
• Victor (1797)
- Found at age 13; apparently living in woods; neither deaf nor mute; exhibited characteristics common to wild children (e.g. insensitive to temperature, eating habits)
- After 9 months: could spell words (by matching written form to object); cried, sense of justice, empathy, gestural communication
- After 5 years
• Could finally apply names of things to
larger semantic groups (book)
• Could write some words, learned
adjectives and verbs.
• Details of vocabulary size unknown
C10:61• Genie (1970): modern-day isolated child- Found at 13; insensitive to temperature and touch, silent, but social (good eye contact), mouthed words silently
- After 8 months: ~200 words, utterances correspond to 2-word Stage
- Eventually large vocabulary, but Syntax impoverished
- After 1 year: spontaneous production of 3-word utterances, followed compound 2-word utterances
- Preposed negative (e.g., with no job would she be happy)
- After 2 years: -ing morpheme; still mostly content words; no function morphemes (pronouns, affixes, articles, occasional plural marker, occasional "the“)
- After 3 years: Past tense markers
- Most sentences 5-7 morphemes long
- Some ability for longer expressions: At school teacher give block. Father hurt Genie cry long time ago. Mama not have baby grow up. Mama say not lift my leg in dentist chair. Mr. W. say put face in big swimming pool.
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Outline
• Thinking
- Concepts
- Solving Problems
- Making Decisions• Thinking about risk
- Belief Bias
• Language
- Language Structure
- Language Development
• Thinking and Language- Language Influences Thinking
- Thinking in Images
• Animal Thinking and Language- Do animals think?
- Do animals exhibit language?
- The Case of the Apes
C10:63
Language and Thought
• Interplay of thought and language
• Much interest in relationship between language and thinking
C10:64Language Influences Thinking
• Linguistic Determinism- Benjamin Whorf’s hypothesis that language determines way people think:• “We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds.” (Whorf, 1940)
- Strong version of Whorfian hypothesis not generally endorsed by contemporary scholars, but …
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• Whorf (cont’d)
- But still number of important findings• Benefits of bilingual education (Lambert)
• Benefits of sign language for deaf children
• Effects on concept of Self: e.g., “I am …” task
- Some empirical results• Languages divide colour spectrum in different ways. English has many colour terms, whereas some languages have as few as two (roughly dark vs. light). These differences appear to influence perception and memory of colour, although not in dramatic ways originally proposed by Whorf and other advocates of linguistic relativity (+1).
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• Language has subtle effects on color perception- e.g., faster to decide “different” for colors in comparison A (different color names) than for colors in comparison B (same color names), even though two comparisons involve colors that are equally far apart on color spectrum
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Thinking in Images
• Much learning and competent performance depends on skills that are non-linguistic
- Mental practice of athletes, musicians, …
- Knowledge of syntactic and other linguistic rules probably non-verbal
- Recall earlier chapters (e.g., perception, reading, and other skilled behaviours)
• Issue also appears in chapter on Intelligence Testing
- Some people have proposed different kinds of intelligence, some clearly verbal and some not
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Animal Thinking and Language
• Much interest about nature of animal thought, whether animals have “language,” and relationship between two
• Earlier example of animals demonstrating “insight” in solving problem. Other examples.- Animal uses stick to get insects from hole
- Baboon “pretends” to see enemy (gives alarm) to stop other baboons who are chasing him
• Animals can also pass “skills” on from one generation to next- Japanese macaques washing food
• Do animals with these capacities also demonstrate something that merits label “language?” Much controversy.
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Animal Thinking and Language
• Animal communication -Bees
• Straight-line part of dance points in direction of nectar source, relative to sun (left)
• Speed of dance indicates how far; slower = farther (+1 from Von Frisch)
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Animal Thinking and Language
• Animal Communication
- Gestures observed in apes, and also important part of human speech
• In humans- Disrupting gestures disrupts speaking
- Even blind gesture
- Signing develops naturally among deaf
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The Case of the Apes
• Animal Communication
• Number of long-term attempts to teach chimpanzees language
- Not speech, but sign language or use of symbols for words
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• Some quite amazing results- Impressive (for animals) vocabularies: several hundred terms
- Ability to use two-word utterances
• Is it really language?• Much effort to achieve limited success
- Does not approach complexity of human language
- Degree of novelty less than in children
- Growth in vocabulary and length of utterances not comparable to children
- Perhaps “wishful thinking” on part of researchers / trainers?
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• Dolphins another animal with striking abilities to learn complex tasks and perhaps communicate
