Hockenbury Discovering Psychology 5th txtbk

CONCEPTMAPTHINKING, LANGUAGE, AND INTELLIGENCECognition:The mental activities involved in acquiring,retaining, and using knowledgeThinking:The manipulation of mental representations of informationin order to draw inferences and conclusionsMental images:Are manipulated in the sameway as actual objectsConcepts:Mental categories of objects orideas based on shared propertiesFormal concepts:Defined by strict rulesor specific featuresSolving Problems and Making DecisionsNatural concepts:• Have “fuzzy boundaries”• Develop out of everyday experience• New instances are classified bycomparing them to prototypes orexemplarsProblem-solving strategies:• Trial and error: Try differentsolutions, eliminate those thatdon’t work• Algorithm: Follow a specific ruleor procedure that always producesthe correct solution• Heuristics: Follow a rule of thumbto reduce number of potentialsolutions• Insight: Reach solutions throughsudden realization of correctanswer• Intuition: Reach conclusion or judgmentwithout conscious awarenessof the thought processes involvedDecision-making models:• Single-feature model• Additive model• Elimination by aspects modelLanguage and ThoughtLanguage characteristics:• Meaning is conveyed by arbitrarysymbols whose meaning is shared byspeakers of the same language• Rule-based system• Generative• Involves displacementWhen events are uncertain,decision-making strategies that involveestimating the likelihood of an event:• Availability heuristic: How easily canyou remember similar instances?• Representativeness heuristic: Howsimilar is the current situationto your prototype for an event?Effect of language on thinking:• Language can alter our perceptionsof others.• Linguistic relativity hypothesis:Do differences among languagescause differences in the thoughtsof their speakers?Animal cognition, or comparativecognition, is the study of animallearning, memory, thinking, andlanguage.