introductory psychology winter 2014
TRANSCRIPT
Introductory Psychology
WINTER 2014
Language and Thought
Chapter 9 of Feist & Rosenberg “Psychology: Perspecties & Connections”
Van Selst
Language is:
• Open and symbolic communication system that has
rules of grammar and allows its users to express
abstract and distant ideas
• system of communication that allows people to
encode meanings into words and to combine
words in order to express or share ideas and
feelings; a form of communication consisting of
words, sounds, meanings, and rules for their
combination.
LANGUAGE
The Nature of Language
Van Selst (General Psychology)
Morpheme• units of meaning in language
Phoneme• units of sound in language
Syntax• Rules for arranging words and symbols in
sentences
Grammar • Comprises the entire set of rules for combining
symbols and sounds to speak and write a particular
language
Characteristics of Language
Productive: (generativity)
• allows novel utterances
Meaningful (semanticity)
• denotative (definition)
• connotative (individual variation in
definition/meaning [culture, etc])
Allows displacement; (changes in time).
Has Syntax: rules for ordering words & phrases
• (“white wine” vs. “vino blanco”)
• Active construction is easier/faster to parse.
Van Selst (General Psychology)
Linguistic Determinism
Linguistic Determinism (Sapir-Whorf hypothesis)
• “as we speak, so we think”
• [discussion on “sexist” language]
• Language structures our thoughts and organizes our
world view
• language determines how we think and perceive
• Thought creates language and language creates thought
e.g., bilingual children versus monolingual children
• greater ability to form conceptual ideas
• greater cognitive flexibility
• greater verbal creativity
• “Eskimo language myth” (but…)
Van Selst (General Psychology)
History of Language
Protolanguage
• Very rudimentary language, also known as
paralanguage
Grammatical language
• Used by Homo sapiens
• Co-Evolved with the complexity of the human
brain
Van Selst (General Psychology)
Development of Language
Motherese (Parentese / child-directed language): lilting, high-
pitched, exaggerated tone (helps infants learn); sooths, attention
capturing, highlights important aspects of language
Sensitive period: A Principle of language development is when
children are not exposed to any human language before a certain
age, their language abilities never fully develop
• “Genie”
Age Behavior
1-2 months Nonword vowel sounds (back and forth “turn taking”
with caregiver)
4 months Babbling; consonant-vowel pairs
6-16 months Single word utterances (MLU = 1)
24 months 2-3 word utterances (MLU = 2-3)
4 years Adult-like speech (Mean Length of Utterance >4 uninformative)
Theories of Language
Acquisition
SocioCultural Theories
Environmental Influence
Culture, Status, Birth Order, School, Peers, ..
Conditioning and Learning Theory
Progression of Language uses
Shaping, Successive Approximations, Reinforcement
Nativist Theory
We discover language rather than learn it
Language is inborn (Chomsky’s Linguistic Acquisition Device [LAD])
Nature, Nurture, and Language Learning
innately guided learning
Grammar is more innate
Vocabulary is more environmental
Van Selst (General Psychology)
The learning-theory approach suggests that language
acquisition follows the principles of reinforcement and
conditioning (includes imitation / modeling )
•A child who says “mama”
receives hugs and praise
from her mother, which
reinforces the behavior of
saying “mama” and makes
its repetition more likely.
Theories of Language
Acquisition
The more words parents say to their children before the age of 3, the larger the children’s vocabulary.
(Source: Courtesy of Drs. Betty Hart and Todd Risley, 1977.)
Theories of Language
Acquisition
Bilingualism
• After about age 7 (end of the sensitive period),
learning a second language becomes more
difficult
• Bilingualism enhances cognitive processing
• Bilingualism enhances metacognition
• Bilinguals have a lower rate of dementia in the
elderly
•Wernicke’s area, in the temporal lobe, is primarily involved in speech comprehension.
•Damage to this cortical region leaves patients unable to understand written or spoken speech.
•Broca’s area, in the frontal lobe, is mainly involved in the production of speech through its connections with the motor cortex region that controls the muscles used in speech.
•Damage to this area leaves patients with the ability to comprehend speech, but not to express themselves in words or sentences.
Cognitive Psychology
Cognitive Psychology is the science of
understanding how people think, learn,
remember, and perceive
• Cognition is the mental processes involved in
acquiring, processing, and storing knowledge
(including language)
Van Selst (General Psychology)
Cognitive Psychology
Scientific thinking
• Generate, test, and revise theories
Metacognitive thinking
• Ability first to think and then to reflect on one’s own
thinking
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The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Critical Thinking
Critical Thinking is the ability
to analyze facts, generate
and organize ideas, defend
opinions, make
comparisons, draw
inferences, evaluate
arguments, and solve
problems (Chance, 1986)
Mental Representation
(3 major theories)dual-coding hypothesis
• Imaginal + verbal storage
conceptual-propositional hypothesis
• visual & verbal information represented in the form of abstract representations
• e.g., story sentence recall very poor (just content)
• reject isomorphism
• isomorphism: iso = same morph = shape; “picture in the head”
functional-equivalency hypothesis
• imagery & perception are highly similar
• Mental Rotation
• Mental Maps (Kosslyn)
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Companies, Inc.
Mental Representation
Visual representation
• Visual imagery
• Visual representations created by the brain after the
original stimulus is no longer present
• Mental rotation
Mental Imagery
(Mental Rotation Task)
Subjects were to identify
whether or not two
adjacent objects were
the “same” or
“different” disregarding
their angle of
presentation
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Companies, Inc.
Mental Representation
Verbal representation
• Concept
• Concept hierarchy
• Parallel distributive processing (PDP)
• Category
• Concept that organizes other concepts around what
they all share in common
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Companies, Inc.
Parallel Distributed Network of a Verbal Concept:
“Living Thing”
Mental Representation
Semantic Network
A complex web of
semantic associations
that link items in
memory such that
retrieving one item
triggers the retrieval of
others as well
Supported by research
using the lexical decision
making task
Semantic Networks
Originally Proposed by Collins & Quillian (looking for a way to help
computers process natural language).
The original suggestion was that the organization be hierarchical
(superordinate and subordinate categories levels).
Later (to accommodate TYPICALITY, a FEATURE-LIST
representation was proposed (Smith) then later superseded by
semantic association networks with varying connection strengths.
There is strong evidence that people organize information in multiple
different ways (THEMATIC RELATIONS, FUNCTION, TAXONOMIC
SIMILARITY)
Concept
a mental grouping of persons, places, ideas,
events, or objects that share common
properties (Markman, 1999; Vaan Loocke,
1999)
the building blocks of thought
The mental categories or underlying ideas
we use to think about and remember
situations, ideas, objects, and qualities
They help us to interpret the world
Categorization
(Membership)
Prototype model: concepts based on “typicality” or “memorability” (stereotype) (e.g., Easier and faster to note that Robin “is a” bird; duck “is a” bird is harder / slower) – for learning if it is similar enough to the prototype, it is grouped together.
Feature-List: a particular characteristics or set of characteristics is required for category membership
Exemplar-Based: how similar is the stimuli to existing exemplars?
ASSIMILATION: interpret new stimuli in terms of existing concepts
ACCOMMODATION: change concepts to fit new stimuli
Mental Representation
(Naïve Physics)
Mental Models
• Intuitive or “personal” models of how things work
• The “user model” in the Human Factors tripartite breakdown of system model, user model, & display model
• Inaccurate mental models are demonstrable with McCloskey’s Naïve Physics (curved tube; cliff edge; plane; tilted tube)
The Relationship Between
Thought and Language
•Participants were shown
figures on the left, with
different labels.
•When asked to redraw the
figures, the new drawings fit
the labels they had been
given.
Labels Can Distort Memory
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Companies, Inc.
How Do We Make Judgments and
Decisions?
Representative heuristic
• Estimate the probability of one event based on
how typical it is of another event
Availability heuristic
• Make decisions based on the ease with which
estimates come to mind or how available they are
to our awareness
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Companies, Inc.
Reasoning
Process of drawing inferences or conclusions from
principles and evidence
• Deductive reasoning
• General to specific
• Inductive reasoning
• Specific to general
• Casual inferences
• Confirmation bias
Nonrational Decision Making
David Kahneman challenged rational choice theory
with research on human judgment and decision
making
• Won Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002
• Conjunction fallacy
Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in
philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of
discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear
demonstrations. Is it more likely that Linda is a bank teller, or a bank teller
and feminist?
Decision Making
Top-down bias: existing world knowledge biases your reasoning (e.g., in syllogism must take “givens” at face value so answer to “all animals are white” “all bears are animal” thus “all bears are white” is VALID even though we know it is not really true)
Confirmation bias: our tendency to seek evidence that confirms (rather than disconfirms) our decisions and beliefs [this is why so many people have trouble with hypothesis testing (vs Ho) in research methods).
Availability Heuristic: making a decision based on ease of retrieval from memory. You estimate the frequency or probability of an event by how easy or fast it is to think of examples of the event. This is often accurate, but can lead to errors when availability is not correlated with true, objective frequency.
• Frequency
• Familiarity
• Salience
• Vividness Examples:
• Words with K 1st vs. 3rd (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973)
• How many words with K first vs. third?
• (people say first-k but really more third-k [harder to think of them])
Decision Making
Representativeness Heuristic: judgment strategy based on estimates of how similar an event seems to be to its population: whether the event seems similar to the process that produced it, or, how similar is event to the population of events it came from. A sample looks representative if it is similar in important characteristics to the population from which it was selected. For example, a random process should produce a random looking result.
• Which sequence of coin tosses is more likely?
HHHHHH HHHTTT THHTHT
The gambler’s fallacy: Ignoring the effect of sample size. The Law of small numbers is the mistaken belief that small samples will be representative of the population from which they are selected. (this is a _mistake_ that people make... it is not a real law)
Simulation Heuristic - to make a prediction of some future event, or imagine a different outcome of some event or action.
• The undoing heuristic - changing events (more likely downhill changes than horizontal or uphill changes [p.375])
Hindsight Bias - because the scenario happened, we feel that the outcome should have been predictable since it is now very easy to picture how the event could have happened.
Anticipating Outcomes (using simulation) both positive and negative and then deciding what to do based on these anticipated outcomes tends to produce more realistic (rather than biased) evaluations.
Overconfidence – whether on factual items or predicted future performance, confidence generally exceeds performance
Decision Making
Context Dependence
Framing Effects - the way a question is worded has an important effect on people's decisions. This effect is both robust & pervasive. (Asian Disease, theatre ticket, calculator).
Anchoring and Adjustment - People usually begin by guessing a first approximation -- an anchor -- and then make adjustments to that number of the basis of additional information. Often leads to a reasonable answer, but can lead to errors in some cases.
• It the average price of an undergraduate textbook more than, or less than, $10.00?
• What is the average price of an undergraduate textbook?
• typical finding: those with the $10 anchor produce lower estimated prices than those students given a $100 anchor. Part of this is due to the availability heuristic. It also works to bias estimates of frequency or number (e.g., the number of countries in Africa. anchor at 5 versus anchor at 80...).
Formal Logic (Syllogisms)
Syllogistic Reasoning: given two premises (major & minor, assume true) does conclusion follow? Test with venn diagrams in an attempt to show the disconfirming case (Johnson-Laird, 1999). Note: people’s beliefs can overwhelm “logical” analysis.
Some animals are white
All bears are animals
Thus, some bears are white
Beware of the
Confirmation
Bias
Formal Logic
(Conditional Reasoning)
Conditional Reasoning:
• two major parts:
(1) The Conditional clause (if-then)
(2) The Evidence.
Determine whether the evidence supports, refutes or is irrelevant to the stated conclusion.
• The "if" clause of the conditional is the antecedent
• The "then" clause of the condition is the consequent
If P then Q
P
Thus, Q
If it is Foggy in San Francisco, then planes are delayed
It is foggy in San Francisco
Planes are delayed.
Formal Logic
(Conditional Reasoning)
There are four possible conditional reasoning situations:
If P then Q
P
Thus, Q valid inference AFFIRM THE ANTECEDENT (modus ponens)
If P then Q
Not P
Thus, NOT Q invalid inference DENY THE ANTECEDENT
If P then Q
Q
Thus, P invalid inference AFFIRM THE CONSEQUENT
If P then Q
Not Q
Thus, NOT P valid inference DENY THE CONSEQUENT (modus tollens)
Formal Logic
(Conditional Reasoning)People are generally good about Affirming the Antecedent, but have
difficulty denying the consequent. People also have a tendency to engage in the two invalid forms. In addition, people have a tendency to perform and "ILLICIT CONVERSION" and switch the condition from if P, then Q to If Q then P.
Example: Wason Card Problem (Wason, 1960)
Which card or cards do you need to turn over to test "if VOWEL on one side then EVEN on other side".
E K 4 7
(Typically subjects will show a confirmation bias)
Martini Coke 31 17
(Meaningful material seems to help)
(People are not very good at abstract logic)
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Introduction to Psychology taught by Dr. Mark Van Selst during the Summer 2013 term at San Jose State University.
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