Language and Communication

Week 12: Language

• Language is a socially agreed upon, governed system that symbolizes to communicate feelings
• Communication relies on a common ground to facilitate conversation
• Audience design is when speakers tailor their utterances based on the audience's knowledge
• Conversational coordination is achieved through interactively aligning actions at different levels
• Lexicon is the words and expressions used in language as one level of alignment
• Situation models activate interpersonal alignments and are representations about topics in a conversation
• Priming is the mechanism where thinking about a concept reminds of other related concepts
• Gossip comprises 60%-70% of everyday conversation, where people talk about themselves and others whom they know
• Gossip is an act of socialization for communication and helps humans share representations about the social world
• Ingroups are groups to which one belongs
• Outgroups are groups that are likely to be one's enemies
• An evolutionary advantage and larger brains have resulted from these social effects
• The social brain hypothesis says that the human brain has evolved for humans to maintain larger ingroups
• Dunbar estimates the group size that human brains can support is about 150, around the size of hunter-gatherer communities
• Language, brain, and human group living have co-evolved, and language and human sociality are inseparable
• Everyday language use maintains the existing structure of intergroup relationships
• Language can influence how our social world is construed
• Subtle cues can convey whether an action is a special case or a character trait
• Actions of ingroup members are described positively using adjectives
• Actions of outgroup members are described negatively using adjectives
• Linguistic intergroup bias is the tendency to characterize positive things about the ingroup using more abstract expressions, but negative things about their outgroups using more abstract expressions
• Gossip can spread through social networks and assimilate into the common ground
• Thoughts and feelings are shaped by linguistic representation rather than the original experience
• Linguistic representation of emotion biases speaker's memory of that emotion
• Linguistically labeling one's own emotional experience can alter neural processes
• Verbalizing emotional experiences and linguistic reconstructions of negative life events have therapeutic effects
• A type of language use that is repeated by a large number of people in a community can affect thoughts and action
• Sapir-Whorf hypothesis proposes that the language that people use determines their thoughts
• Language does not completely determine our thoughts, but habitual uses of language can influence our habit of thought and action
• Explicit reference to "you" and "I" may remind speakers of the distinction between the self and other
• A linguistic practice can act as a constant reminder of cultural value and encourage performing the linguistic practice
• Common ground is the assumption of shared information in language
• Crafting what you say based on the knowledge of the person you engage with is audience design
• Rules for how words/expressions are arranged to communicate meaningfully and understandably defines syntax
• Syntax can vary even if lexical items are similar

Theory of Mind

• A fascinating human capacity is the ability to perceive and interpret other people's behaviour in terms of their mental states
• An appreciation of another person's mind is a prerequisite for natural language acquisition
• Theory of mind is a collection of concepts and processes that include agent, intentionality, goal detection, imitation, empathy, and perspective-taking
• The theory of mind frames and interprets perceptions of human behaviour as perceptions of agents who can act intentionally and who have desires, beliefs, and other mental states to guide their actions
• Humans need to understand minds to engage in complex interactions that social communities require
• Complex social interactions have given rise, in human cultural evolution, to complex concepts
• Teaching actions or rules requires accounting for learner's knowledge
• Learning language involves monitoring what others attend to and are trying to do
• Social standing is ascertained by guessing what others think and feel
• Experiences are shared by communicating preferences
• Collaboration in a task requires signaling shared goals and trusting the other's intentions
• Individuals with autism may be able to analyze others, but this analytical mode is very tiresome and slow
• The agent category allows humans to identify those moving objects in the world that can act on their own
• Indicators of being an agent include being self-propelled, having eyes, and reacting systematically to the interaction partner's behavior
• Recognizing goals allows seeing the systematic relationship between an agent pursuing an object
• Humans learn to pick out behaviors that are intentional when learning to recognize the ways agents pursue goals
• Human perceivers can recognize some behaviors can be unintentional and goal-directed
• Acting intentionally requires a goal and beliefs about achieving it, where an agent has the skill to perform the intentional action

Imitation, Synchrony, and Empathy

• Imitation is the human tendency to carefully observe others' behaviors and do as they do
• Mimicry is a subtle form of imitation
• Synchrony is the state when people mutually mimic one another
• Synchrony can happen even at negative physiological arousal levels
• Synchronizing is made possible by brain mechanisms tightly linking perceptual information with motor information
• Mirror neurons fire both when a monkey sees a certain action and when it performs that same action
• Automatic empathy is a social perceiver unwittingly taking on the internal state of another person
• Mimicking the person's expressive behavior typically produces automatic empathy
• Joint attention occurs when two people are attending to the same object and are aware that they both are attending to it
• Visual perspective taking can refer to perceiving something from another person's spatial vantage point or to effortful mental state inference
• Simulation (and the Specter of Egocentrism) refers to those tools used to understand thoughts or feelings
• Use of one's own mental states as model for others' mental states is simulation
• Like-me assumption and social projection are incliniations where one assumes the other's perspective is equal to their own
• Absence of perspective taking occurs when we assume the other's perspective equals our own
• False-belief test assesses whether the perceiver recognizes that another person has a false belief that contradicts reality
• The false-belief test requires inferring the false belief against better knowledge
• The other person's perspective and the people that embody them needs to be accurately represented
• People use motion, faces, and gestures to categorize action concepts like agent, intentional action, or fear
• People's explanations of behavior differ if behavior is unintentional and intentional
• Cathy unknowingly begins to use a lot of hand gestures like Tomas in their conversation. This phenomenon is known as mimicry
• In first year of life people start to develop a theory of mind
• The false-belief test is a procedure for determining explicit mental state inference
• Individuals need to understand others' mental states in order to interact
• Assessing intentionality is an example of a tool of a theory of mind

Week 13: Cognitive Development

• A category is a set of objects treated as equivalent
• The mental representations we form of categories are called concepts
• Concepts are at the core of intelligent behavior
• Concepts provide necessary features for category membership
• The defining features of concept membership must be jointly sufficient
• Fuzzy categories arise when people change their minds about borderline items
• Typicality is the "goodness" of category members, ranging from the prototype to borderline members

Influences of Typicality on Cognition

• Typical items are judged category members more often
• Speed of categorization is faster for typical items
• Typical members are learned before atypical ones
• Learning a category is easier if typical examples are provided
• In language comprehension, references to typical members are understood more easily
• In language production, people tend to say typical items before atypical ones
• Something is typical if it has features frequent in the category and does not have features frequent in other categories
• Basic level of categorization is the neutral and preferred category for a given object, at an intermediate level of specificity
• Basic-level categories are more differentiated as category members are similar to one another, but they are different from members of other categories
• Prototype theory suggests that people have a summary representation of the category
• By prototype theory, when you learn a category, you learn a general description applicable to the category as a whole
• Psychological essentialism is the belief that members of a category have an unseen property that causes it to be in the category and have the properties associated with it

Cognitive Development

• Cognitive development is the development of thinking across the lifespan
• Changes in children’s thinking happen in dramatic and surprising ways
• Piaget’s stage theory outlines development occurs from sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, to formal operational discontinuous stages
• Sociocultural theories: emphasizes how other people and the attitudes, values, and beliefs of the surrounding culture influence children’s development by Lev Vygotsky
• Information processing theories refers to the examination of mental processes that produce thinking and transition processes that lead to growth in that thinking
• Nature is biological from genes of parents, while nurture is environment and social parts influencing nurture
• Whether cognitive development is a product of nature or nurture is an either/or question
• The issue is how nature and nurture work together to produce cognitive development
• Sensorimotor stage occurs from birth to 2 years
• Preoperational reasoning stage occurs from 2 to 6 or 7 years
• Concrete operational reasoning stage occurs from 6 or 7 to 11 or 12 years
• Formal operational reasoning stage occurs from 11 or 12 years and throughout the rest of life
• During the sensorimotor stage, children’s thinking is largely realized through their perceptions of the world and their physical interactions with it
• During the preoperational stage, symbolic-representation capabilities are developed, such as those involved in drawing and language
• By the concrete operations stage, the tendency to focus on a single dimension are overcome, and the beginning of logical thought emerges
• Phonemic awareness is a crucial skill when learning to read
• Educational application of cognitive development research involves the area of mathematics
• Social perception forms building blocks of thinking about motives and emotions of others
• The social brain consists of interconnected neuroanatomical structures processing social information, enabling recognition of others and evaluation of mental states like intentions, dispositions, desires, and beliefs
• The social brain includes the amygdala, orbital frontal cortex (OFC), fusiform gyrus (FG), and posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS) region, among other structures
• FMRI uses powerful magnets to measure the levels of oxygen within the brain, which vary according to changes in neural activity when looking an MRI scanner
• ERP specifies the timing of processing at the millisecond pace

Endophenotypes

• A characteristic that reflects a genetic liability for disease and a more basic component of a complex clinical presentation
• Endophenotypes are less developmentally malleable than overt behaviour
• Event-related potentials (ERP) measure the firing of groups of neurons in the cortex
• Neuronal activity from specific types of information creates small electrical currents that ERP measures
• Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) entails the use of powerful magnets to measure the levels of oxygen within the brain that vary with changes in neural activity The set of neuroanatomical structures that allow us to understand the actions and intentions of other people defines the social brain

Week 14 - Social and Emotional Development

• Understanding social and personality development requires children to be examined from three perspectives
• First perspective to be examined is the social contexts, like having a base for providing guidance
• Second is biological maturation and how it supports competency
• Third is representations of self and the social world
• Infants develop strong emotional attachments to those who care for them
• Developing attachments is a natural development instead of from parents giving food
• Infants become securely attached when they are responded to sensitively
• Infants are insecurely attached when care is neglectful
• Studies of strange situations show the caregiver leaving the child alone in a room but returning later to observe its response
• Secure attachment aids personality development
• Parental roles include becoming mediators of their children’s involvement
• Peers and child interactions are a useful development since they form social skills that are valuable for life
• Peer acceptance and rejection is a primary source self-affirmation but peer rejection can foreshadow later behaviours
• An additional effect of that can be developed is different emotional skills that may be apparent outside the relationships with parents
• Social referencing is when an individual consults a source for its emotional expression to evaluate ambiguous and uncertain circumstances
• Infants are able to respond positively after seeing that the caregiver appears calm during situations
• Temperament consists of early differences in reactivity
• It develops from experience that can shape personality
• Goodness of fit refers to the matching or the synochrony between temperament of caregiver that leads into positive personality development
• For social context, it depends of bio maturation but also helps in seeing oneself
• The strange situation is used to asses attachment styles by exposing a child separation and reuniting with his or her caregiver

Functions of Emotions

• Cultural display rules specify management and modification of emotional expressions according to social circumstances
• People can be instructed to express what as they feel, by exaggerating , toning down or conceal emotions by showing something else

Emotions

• Interpersonal emotion refers to relationships or intercations between two people or more in a group
• Intrapersonal emotions refer to what occurs within the self
• Society defines emotion of the world such things of that it has that affect societies
• Social referencing: Process to clarify situation and find information from others

Attachment

• Children cry when separated from those who they care about
• Secure expression manifest an immature defence mechanism
• Proximity is sought with his or her primary attachment figure during stressful times
• Separation is prevented from happening and to function with re attachment

Attachment Patterns

• Attachment style refers to how secure a person his the ability think
• Lab tests are used to briefly separate and reunite infants and also to study on individual differences
• Those research shows macaque monkeys found soft cloths comforted them . secure Children persist and get easily attached

Week 15: Adolescence, adulthood, aging

• Development in adolescents includes puberty that ends into adulthood
• Concrete thoughts change to to complex thinking
• High order thinking , better attention and fast speeds are related to cognition
• The renegotiation during adolescence involves parents - child relationship
• High order independence Is necessary but parenting plays a key role
• Monitoring is also important as the period of independence during times that are away is in presence of peers
• Influence from from different kind Is one part that involves positive and negative experience
• Peers are together with what a function of similar experience that can find bird a feather
• Identity when no exposure that diffuses is also where high order moratorium that also is making changes
• Identity and commitments leads one to shift towards abstract thinking

Aging

• A life stage ranging from 18 to 25 where love and work are constructed
• Primary features include identity, insta focus that feels adult hood
• Individualism believes that freedom in highly valued