PSYC 1020H Chapter Notes - Chapter 8: Grey Matter, Decision-Making, Bounded Rationality
10 Apr 2018
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Document Summary
Cognition refers to the mental processes involved in acquiring knowledge. Cognitive psychologists investigate the complexities of language, inference, problem solving, decision making, and reasoning. Includes: remembering, understanding, reasoning, decision- making, problem-solving, planning, communicating. Language consists of symbols that convey meaning, plus rules for combining those symbols, that can be used to generate an infinite variety of messages. The human language is broken into a hierarchy: phenomes, morpheme, word, phrase, sentence. Phenomes are the smallest speech unit in a language that can be distinguished perceptually: the sounds that create a word (ex/ z, , ) Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning in a language: the deconstruction of a word (ex/ strangers -> strange er s) Semantics is the area of language concerned with understanding the meaning of words and word combinations. Syntax is a system of rules that specify how words can be arranged into sentences: must have both a subject and a verb.
