COGNITION AND LANGUAGE

Lecture by
Ayesha
Lecturer Psychology
 Cognition

It is the general term for all forms of knowing, these include attending,
remembering, reasoning, imagining, anticipating, planning, deciding and
problem solving and communicating ideas.
Cognition refers to the higher mental processes.
It is through these mental processes that humans understand the world, process
information
 Cognition

Psychologists who study cognition focus on the mental activities associated with thinking,
knowing, remembering, and communicating information. One of these activities is forming
concepts—mental groupings of similar objects, events, ideas, and people. The concept
chair includes many items—a baby’s high chair, a reclining chair, a dentist’s chair—all of
which are for sitting. Concepts simplify our thinking. Imagine life without them. We would
need a different name for every person, event, object, and idea. We could not ask a child to
“throw the ball” because there would be no concept of throw or ball. Instead of saying,
“They were angry,” we would have to describe expressions, intensities, and words.
Concepts such as ball and anger give us much information with little cognitive effort
 Cognition

Mental images: mental representations that stand for objects or events and have
a picture-like quality.
Schemas: are the primary units of meaning in the human information processing
system. Schemas are defined as basic unit of knowledge, generalizations about
the world that form through experience and serve as building blocks of
intellectual development.
 Cognitive Development

Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development

A child's cognitive development is about a child constructing a mental model of
the world. Piaget believed that children go through 4 universal stages of
cognitive development.
Development is biologically based and changes as the child matures. Cognition
therefore develops in all children in the same sequence of stages.
 Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development

1. Sensorimotor Stage (Birth-2 years)

The main achievement during this stage is object permanence - knowing that an
object still exists, even if it is hidden.
It requires the ability to form a mental representation (i.e. a schema) of the
object.
 Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development

2. Preoperational Stage (2-7 years)

During this stage, young children are able to think about things symbolically.
This is the ability to make one thing - a word or an object - stand for something
other than itself.
Thinking is still egocentric, and the infant has difficulty taking the viewpoint of
others.
 Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development

3. Concrete Operational Stage (7-11 years)

Piaget considered the concrete stage a major turning point in the child's cognitive
development, because it marks the beginning of logical or operational thought.
This means the child can work things out internally in their head (rather than physically
try things out in the real world).
Children can conserve number (age 6), mass (age 7), and weight (age 9).
Conservation is the understanding that something stays the same in quantity even though
its appearance changes
 Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development

4. Formal Operational Stage (11 years and over)

The formal operational stage begins at approximately age eleven and lasts into
adulthood.
During this time, people develop the ability to think about abstract concepts, and
logically test hypotheses.
 Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development

Each child goes through the stages in the same order, and no stage can be missed
out - although some individuals may never attain the later stages.
There are individual differences in the rate at which children progress through
stages.
Piaget did not claim that a particular stage was reached at a certain age -
although descriptions of the stages often include an indication of the age at
which the average child would reach each stage.
 Problem solving

One tribute to our rationality is our problem-solving skill.

Problem Solving is the process of working out or discovering how to reach such
a goal.
What’s the best route around this traffic jam?
 How shall we handle a friend’s criticism?
How can we get in the house without our keys?
 Steps in problem solving

There are four steps:

• Preparation: before finding a solution first step should be the interpretation and
understanding the problem.
• Production: it involves thinking about possible solutions.
• Incubation: if none of the possible solutions would work then incubation is adopted. it
is temporary withdrawal by a person for sometime without finding a solution, when the
person returns to the problem, he finds the elusive solution.
• Judgment: it involves the evaluation of the solution and its effectiveness.
Problem trial and
error

Solving algorithms

Strategies
heuristics

insight
 Problem solving strategies

Trial and error: Some problems we solve through trial and error. Thomas
Edison tried thousands of light bulb filaments before stumbling upon one that
worked.
Algorithms For other problems, we use algorithms, step - by - step procedures
that guarantee a solution. But step - by - step algorithms can be laborious. To
find a word using the 10 letters in SPLOYOCHYG, for example, you could try
each letter in each of the 10 positions—907,200 permutations in all.
 Problem solving strategies

Heuristics: are simpler thinking strategies. Thus, you might reduce the number
of options in the SPLOYOCHYG example by grouping letters that often appear
together (CH and GY) and excluding rare letter combinations (such as two Y’s
together). By using heuristics and then applying trial and error, you may hit on
the answer. A heuristic is a short-cut, step-saving thinking strategy or principle
which generates a solution quickly (but possibly in error).
Insight: a sudden realization of a problem’s solution; contrasts with strategy -
based solutions.
 Obstacles in problem solving

Confirmation bias a tendency to search for information that supports our

preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence.
Mental set a tendency to approach a problem in one particular way, often a way
that has been successful in the past.
Fixations: Tendency to repeat wrong solutions and to “fixate” on them, or to
become blind to alternatives. It is an inability to see a problem from a fresh
perspective.
Problem solutions. (a) The dot problem can be solved by extending the lines
beyond the square formed by the dots. Most people assume incorrectly that
they may not do this. (b) The match problem can be solved by building a three-
dimensional pyramid. Most people assume that the matches must be arranged
on a flat surface. If you remembered the four-tree problem from earlier in the
chapter, the match problem may have been easy to solve.
 Judgment and Decision Making

When making each day’s hundreds of judgments and decisions

Is it worth the bother to take an umbrella?
Can I trust this person?
Intuition: we seldom take the time and effort to reason systematically. We just
follow our intuition, our fast, automatic, unreasoned feelings and thoughts.
 Judgment and Decision Making
 The Availability Heuristic:
• Mental Shortcuts (Heuristics):
• Heuristics are quick mental shortcuts our brain uses to make decisions and judgments instantly.
• They help us act quickly but aren’t always accurate.
• What is the Availability Heuristic?
• A mental shortcut where we judge how common or likely something is based on how easily we can recall it.
• Vivid, recent, or distinctive memories tend to feel more common.
• How It Can Mislead Us:
• Events that are dramatic or emotional stick in our minds, making us think they happen more often.
• Example: After the 9/11 attacks, many people judged an entire ethnic group based on one highly memorable
event.
• Why It Happens:
• Our brain gives more weight to vivid or emotional experiences, even if they don’t represent the bigger
picture.
• The Risk:
Overconfidence

 Definition:
o Overconfidence is when we believe in our judgments or knowledge more than we should.
o We often overestimate the accuracy of what we think or know.

 Impact:
o Leads to mistakes or poor decisions because we trust our beliefs too much.
o Example: Assuming you're great at multitasking, you might text while driving, underestimating the risks.

Framing Effects

 Definition:
o Framing is how information is presented, which can influence our decisions and perceptions.
o The same facts can feel different depending on the wording.

 Example:
o Two surgeons describe a surgery:
 Surgeon 1: "10% of patients die during this surgery."
 Surgeon 2: "90% of patients survive this surgery."
o Both are sharing the same statistics, but people perceive the first one as riskier because of the negative framing ("die").

 Why It Matters:
o Framing can sway decisions, even with identical information.
o It highlights the power of language in shaping our perceptions and actions.
 Language

In the process of thinking, people often translate concepts, propositions, mental
models, schemas and scripts into specific words. Much of human thought seems
to be language bound. Language is by no means necessary for thought to occur.
(Furth,1964)
 Language structure

For a spoken language, we would need three building blocks:

Phonemes are the smallest distinctive sound units in a language. To say bat,
English speakers utter the phonemes b, a, and t. (Phonemes aren’t the same as
letters. Chat also has three phonemes—ch, a, and t.)
Morphemes are the smallest units that carry meaning in a given language. In
English, a few morphemes are also phonemes—the personal pronoun I and the
article a, for instance. But most morphemes combine two or more phonemes.
Some, like bat, are words.
 Language structure

Grammar is the system of rules that enables us to communicate with one

another. Grammatical rules guide us in deriving meaning from sounds
(semantics) and in ordering words into sentences (syntax).
 How do we learn language?
Language Development
Language Development is an Amazing Process
We acquire the use of 10 new words per day (on average) between ages 2 and
18.
Children learn the basic grammar of language before they can add 2 + 2.
Most kids can recall words and meanings, and assemble words into sentences,
while simultaneously following social rules for speaking and listening.
 Language Development

Language development is a process starting early in human life. Infants start without knowing a
language, yet by 10 months, babies can distinguish speech sounds and engage in babbling. Some
research has shown that the earliest learning begins in utero when the fetus starts to recognize the
sounds and speech patterns of its mother's voice and differentiate them from other sounds after
birth.
Usually, productive language is considered to begin with a stage of preverbal communication in
which infants use gestures and vocalizations to make their intents known to others. According to a
general principle of development, new forms then take over old functions, so that children learn
words to express the same communicative functions they had already expressed by proverbial
means.
How do we learn language?
Language Talents and Stages
 Languages Influence Thinking

Linguistic-relativity hypothesis The notion that language shapes and may determine the way
people in a particular culture perceive and understand the world.
Linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956) contended that language determines the way we think:
“Language itself shapes a person’s basic ideas.” Those people who have no past tense for their
verbs, could not readily think about the past, said Whorf.
People who are bilingual have numerous brain connections and neural networks.
They also have a hidden talent, the ability to suppress one language while learning another.
This ability tends to go along with other forms of executive control, such as resisting distraction and
inhibiting impulses.
THE END