[Crash Course] Psychology XV& XVI Cognition and language Cognition: our thoughts, perspectives, and expectations, involving knowing, remembering, understanding, communicating and to a certain extent, learning.
Concept: mental grouping of similar objects, people, ideas, or events. concepts, simplify our thinking in such a fundamental way that we usually don't have to stop and think about using them, they're just there.
Prototype: mental image or pinnacle example of a certain thing.
Concepts and prototypes can speed up our thinking, but they also can box our thinking in, and lead to prejudice if we see something that doesn't fit our prototypes. So, it's important to actively keep your mind open to make room for evolving concepts.
Our coginition works to our benefit through our ability to solve problems.
Problem-solving strategies: Plan of attack: -Trail and error -Algorithm: logical, methodical, step-by-step procedure that eventually guarantees a solution, but may be slow to work through. -Heuristic [mental shortcut]: simple strategy that allows us to solve problems faster, although more error-prone than an algorithm.
Confirmation bias: the tendency to look for and favour evidence that confirms our ideas while avoiding or ignoring evidence to the contrary.
Belief perseverance: the tendency to cling to initial conceptions or beliefs despite proof to the contrary.
People can really get weird and defensive when they evade facts and choose to see only the information that confirms their beliefs. They may even become functionally fixed, unable to view a problem from a new perspective. Instead, they just keep approaching a situation with the same mental set, especially if it's worked in the past.
Why smart people make dumb decisions? People believe an event will be more likely to occur if they can conjure up examples or memories of it. The more mentally available those memories are, the more it seems that it's going to happen again [Availability heuristic].
We are great at fearing the wrong things.
Framing: how an issue is posed or presented — framing can significantly affect decisions and judgements.
Language can be accquired spontaneously through observation without planned training .
Language: a set of spoken, written, or signed words and the way we combine them to communicate meaning.
Phonemes: short, distinctive sound units. Morphemes: the smallest units that carry meaning. Grammar: a system of rules that enables us to communicate with and understand others.
Receptive language: the ability to understand what's being said both to, and about us.
Speech development: -Babbling: beginning at about 4 months, the stage of speech development in which the infant spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to the household language. -One-word stage: the stage in speech development, from about age 1 to 2, during which a child speaks mostly in single words. -Two-word stage: beginning about age 2, the stage in speech development during which a child speaks mostly in two-word statements. [sound like telegraphic speech]