Psychology 1000 Lecture Notes - John Bowring, Law School Admission Test, Anagram

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 1000
• Professor: Dr.Mike

Document Summary

Humans are smaller physically but dominate because of ability to manipulate into forms of language, thinking, reasoning, and problem solving mental representations: variety of forms images, ideas, concepts, principles. E. g. mental representations transferred from mind to mind through medium of language. 35,000 years before paintings, 12,000 more for writing. Language = the jewel in the crown of cognition . Language consists of a system of symbols and rules for combining these symbols in ways that can produce an almost infinite number of possible messages or meanings. : language = symbolic: uses sounds, written signs, gestures to refer to things. Linguistic feature displacement: fact that past, future, imaginary events and objects that are not physically present can be symbolically represented and communicated through the medium of language . Language has structure: rules governing how symbols can be combined to create meaningful communication units. May not be able to verbalize rules, but know implicitly because part of language we speak.