PSYC 1001 Chapter Notes - Chapter 8: Gift Card, Functional Fixedness, Confirmation Bias

• School: Carleton University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 1001
• Professor: Elaine Waddington Lamont

Document Summary

Cognition - the mental processes involved in acquiring knowledge. Language - consists of symbols that convey meaning, plus rules for combining those symbols, that can be used to generate an infinite variety of messages. Symbolic: use spoken sounds and written words to describe objects, events, etc. The symbols allow us to talk about an object in another place or an event that happened at another time. Symbols are flexible in the sense that one word can describe more than one thing. The symbols used in a language are arbitrary (others could have been chosen), and they have shared meanings for people who speak english, french, spanish, etc. Generative: limited number of symbols can be combined in an infinite variety of ways to generate an infinite number of messages. Structured: although an infinite variety of sentences can be generated, they must be structured using rules that govern the arrangement of words.