Cognition and Concepts

• Cognition involves mental activities and processes like thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating.
• Cognition incorporates reasoning, judgment, and integrating new information.
• Cognition underpins psychological processes like attention, emotion, consciousness, perception, learning, memory, language, mental health, and social interaction.

Pieces of Cognition: Concepts

• A concept is a mental grouping of similar ideas, objects, events, states, and/or people.
• Concepts can be communicated through images or words like "chair," "party," or "democracy."
• Conceptual art prioritizes the underlying idea over the art itself.

How We Form/Learn Concepts

• Concepts initially formed through definitions (e.g., triangle defined by three sides), but this may not be the sole method.
• Concepts are often formed by developing prototypes, or mental images of the best example of a concept.

The Urge to Categorize

• Categorization may have evolutionary roots.
• It is linked to determining what is safe versus dangerous.
• Categorical speech perception is also a factor.
• Fundamental Attribution Bias (FAB) plays a role
• Determining what is 'real' or 'true' is best described as an incremental dimension with shades of grey.

When Prototypes Fail

• Prototypes fail when examples stretch definitions too far.
• Prototypes fail when the boundaries between concepts are fuzzy

Problem Solving

• Problem solving aims to answer questions or resolve unfavorable situations.
• Strategies include:

Strategies for Problem Solving

• Trial and Error involves trying multiple solutions until one works.
  • It is useful when perfecting inventions, like the light bulb.
  • It is less useful when a clear solution might be missed through random attempts.
• Algorithms involve a step-by-step strategy for methodically solving a problem.
• Heuristics: short-cut thinking strategies that can quickly generate a solution, but are prone to error.
• Insight: a sudden realization or leap forward in thinking that leads to a solution.

Clarifying Problem Solving Examples: Kahneman and Tversky

• Finding an item in a supermarket can be done using trial and error, algorithms, or heuristics.
  • Trial and error: wandering randomly
  • Algorithms: checking every single aisle
  • Heuristics: checking only related aisles.

Trial and Error vs. Algorithms

• Algorithms carefully checks every combination beginning with the letter “C” before moving on to a different starting letter
• Trial and Error: Randomly trying different combinations to solve a word jumble.
• Using algorithm method ensures a solution without duplication and is better than the trial and error method's 782,200 possible combinations.

Insight: The "Aha" Moment

• Insight involves a sudden realization that leads to a solution.
• It causes a sense of satisfaction.
• It is also be accompanied by laughter when understanding the punchline of a joke.

Insight and the Brain

• Brain activity during insight involves:
  • Extra frontal lobe activity
  • Experiencing the "aha" moment
  • A burst of activity in the right temporal lobe

Other Problem-Solving Habits

• Mental set: The tendency to approach problems with a mindset that has worked before.
• Fixation is when someone gets stuck in one way of thinking, which prevents them from seeing a problem from a new perspective.

The Availability Heuristic

• We use the availability heuristic to estimate the likelihood of an event based on its mental availability.
• Winning at a slot machine may seem more likely if one vividly recalls previous wins due to bells, lights etc.

Weighted Attention: Why We Fear the Wrong Things

• The availability heuristic can mislead about the actual dangers, such as planes vs. motorcycles.
• Of the many experiences available to us in forming out judgements, we tend to give more weight to some experiences than others.
• Plane crashes scare us more due to news coverage and memory.
• Natural selection could predispose us to fear heights, lack of control, and confinement, all of which are part of our image of a plane ride.

Do Other Species Think?

• If thinking consists of understanding concepts, including words, numbers, and qualities:
  • Many creatures can memorise object names and parrots can speak the names.
  • Birds can sort objects by shape, color, and type.
  • Alex, an African parrot, could add numbers and answer "what color bigger?" questions.
• If thinking involves solving problems with insight, devising behaviors that were not trained or rewarded and putting strategies together in new combinations
  • A chimpanzee showed sudden problem-solving by using a short stick to reach a longer stick.
• If thinking involves using and passing on cultural (learned, not instinctual) practices
  • Local chimpanzee customs for tool use, grooming, and hunting vary by group and are learned.

Animal Socio-Cognitive Skills

• Baboons can recognize 80 individual voices; sheep can recognize individual faces.
• Chimpanzees and some monkeys can read intention through facial expressions and actions.
• Dolphins, apes, elephants, and social birds can recognize themselves in a mirror.

Do (Other) Animals Use Language?

• Language uses symbols to represent, transmit, and store meaning/information
• Symbols include organized patterns of sounds, visual representations, and movements.
• Meaning includes concepts, quantities, plans, identity, feelings, ideas, facts, and customs.

Uses of Language

• We can hear about and understand phenomena we have never experienced

• We can connect to people far away

• We can make plans and have others carry them out.

• We can guess what another person is thinking.

• We can store information

• Phenomena are the smallest units of sound (vowels and consonants)

• Morphemes are the units of meaning

• Grammar refers to the rules for using words: semantics, definitions, connotations, and syntax.

How Do We Learn Language?

• Language development is an amazing process

Language Development

• We acquire 10 new words per day between ages 2 and 18 years.
• Children learn basic grammar before adding 2 + 2.
• Preschoolers recall words/meanings, assemble sentences, and follow social rules simultaneously.
• 6-year-olds recognize 15,000 words, 11-year-olds 30,000, and adults 75,000.

Language Talents and Stages

• 0-4 months: Receptive language (associating sounds, recognizing sounds)
• 4 months: Productive language (babbling)
• 10 months: Babbling resembles household language.
• 12 months: One-word stage (understanding/saying nouns)
• 18-24 months: Two-word ("telegraphic") speech (adding verbs, missing words)
• 2+ years: Speaking full sentences + understanding complex sentences

Explaining Language Acquisition: Nature vs. Nurture

• Role of the genes:
  • A genetic talent for language exists, without specific language coded in genes.
• Role of experience:
  • Statistical pattern recognition talent that allows infants to recognize syllable patterns.

Skinner and Chomsky

• Skinner's Verbal Behavior (1957) and Chomsky's Syntactic Structures (1957)
• Skinner: language result of reinforcement.
• Chomsky: language is linked to a unique LAD structure in the brain.
• Language is infinite (Steven pinker)

Critical Periods

• Learning a second language is harder with age.
• Early language exposure is important for brain development.
• Language might not develop if not begun by age seven.
• Older age at immigration correlates with poorer second language mastery.

Deaf and Blind Children

• Deaf and blind children can use complex adapted languages, heightened senses.
• Sign language has syntax, grammar, and complex meaning.
• If a deaf infant's parents don't use sign language the child is at a critical period for language development

Brain Damage and Language

• Aphasia involves impairment in the ability to produce or understand language, caused by damage to the brain.
  • Having to speak but not read, to produce words in song but not in conversation, and to speak but not repeat; or producing words in jumbled order

Broca's Area

• Located in the left temporal lobe
• Damage to Broca's area leads to difficulty in putting words together in sentences or even speaking single words, although a person can sing a song

Wernicke's Area

• Located in the left temporal lobe
• Damage to Wernicke's area leads to difficulty comprehending speech and producing coherent speech

How to read a word, steps 1 to 5

• Visual cortex receives written words as visual stimulation)

• Angular gyrus transforms visual representations into an auditory code

• Wernicke's area interprets auditory code

• Broca's area controls speech muscles via the motor cortex

• Motor cortex generates the pronounced word

• Remember: language functions are divided in the brain.

• Receptive language exists in a few species; dogs follow commands.

• Productive language is when many animals use sounds, gestures, and dances to communicate.

Can Other Species Communicate?

• Some chimpanzees learned 245 signs.
• Fellow chimpanzees learned signs from each other without training.
• Washoe seemed to combine words in new ways.
• Chimps do not pick up words as easily as human children.
• Chimp word production lacks syntax, but a bonobo shows understanding.

Language Influencing Thought

• Linguistic determinism suggests language shapes thought.

• Benjamin Whorf: languages influences how we think because the Hopi do not have past tense forms for verbs, it is hard for them to think about the past

• Does language shape emotions or reflect them? Speaking in Japanese provides many extra words for interpersonal emotions such as sympathy and empathy, which Americans might have trouble differentiating. Speaking English gives us many words for self-focused emotions, such as sadness.

• Do language differences shape personality differences? Bilingual people appear to have different personality profiles when describing themselves in different languages "Learn a new language and get a new soul."--Czech proverb.

Color Perception

• “We use our native language to classify and to remember colors. Different languages may vary in where they put the separation between "blue and "green," or they may not have separate words for these colors.”

Languages Improve Thinking: The Bilingual Advantage

• Bilingual individuals have more brain connections and neural networks
• The ability to suppress one language while learning another.
• This ability associates with resisting distraction and inhibiting impulses

Thinking in Images Without Words

• Imagery to improve learning
• Image rehearsal improves behaviour
• Thinking about the road not the destination.
• Everyday decisions like driving are visual

Conclusions

• Thinking affects language, which affects thought and emotion.
• Culture affects language, especially vocabulary.
• Thinking and language develop together.
• Learning another language in adulthood affects thinking style and content.
• Bilingualism promotes social understanding.