Psychology 1000 Chapter Notes - Chapter 9: Metamemory, Mental Rotation, Availability Heuristic

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 1000
• Professor: Terry Biggs

Document Summary

Mental representations: include images, ideas, concepts, and principles; humans have a remarkable ability to create mental representations of the world and to manipulate them in the forms of language, thinking, reasoning, and problem solving. Language: consists of a system of symbols and rules for combining these symbols in ways that can generate an infinite number of possible messages and meanings. Psycholinguistics: the scientific study of the psychological aspects of language, such as how people understand, produce and acquire language. Our conscious thinking usually takes the form of self-talk, or inner speech; through language, we are able to share our thoughts, feelings, goals, intentions, desires, needs, and memories with other people and thus interact socially. 4 properties that are essential to any language: symbols, structure, meaning, and generativity: Language conveys meaning: once people learn certain symbols and rules, they are able to form and then transfer mental representations to the mind of another person: semantics: the meaning of words and sentences.