introductory psychology winter 2014

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.


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…)


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


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


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.


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.)


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)


Cognitive Psychology

Scientific thinking

• Generate, test, and revise theories

Metacognitive thinking

• Ability first to think and then to reflect on one’s own

thinking

Copyright 2013

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)

Copyright 2013 The McGraw-Hill

Companies, Inc.


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


Companies, Inc.


Verbal representation

• Concept

• Concept hierarchy

• Parallel distributive processing (PDP)

• Category

• Concept that organizes other concepts around what

they all share in common


Companies, Inc.

Parallel Distributed Network of a Verbal Concept:

“Living Thing”


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


(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


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


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

http://www.clipartof.com/images/clipart/xsmall2/16292_curious_white_arctic_polar_bear_cub_ursus_maritimus.jpg

http://www.clipartof.com/images/clipart/xsmall2/16292_curious_white_arctic_polar_bear_cub_ursus_maritimus.jpg

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)

www.calstate.edu

Much of the content in this lecture is © McGraw-Hill. Terms of use include restriction to the personal use as a study aid for

Introduction to Psychology taught by Dr. Mark Van Selst during the Summer 2013 term at San Jose State University.

No other use in part of whole is authorized.

http://www.calstate.edu/

introductory psychology winter 2014

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