PSY 103 Chapter Notes - Chapter ch 8 : Language Acquisition Device, Availability Heuristic, Noam Chomsky
1 Aug 2018
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Ch. 8: Cognition and Language
• Cognition means thinking and using knowledge
o Cognitive psychologist deal with people who organize their thoughts into
language
Module 8.1: Attention and Categorization
• Choice blindness: people are blind to their own choices (when people explain a choice
they didn’t actually make)
• Attention: the tendency to respond to and remember some stimuli more than others
o Bottom up process: when a loud noise or flashing light grabs your attention
because your peripheral stimuli controls it
o Top down process: when you deliberately decide to shift your attention (using our
knowledge)
o Preattentive process: the way we find things that stand out immediately because
they differ drastically from the other items in its shape, size, color, or movement.
o Attentive process: when you have to search though items in a series to find the
different one (think of finding waldo books)
o Attention bottleneck: attention is limited
▪ Distractions- like when you’re doing homework and your mind starts
wandering or when you’re driving and arguing or talking on the phone
▪ Stroop effect: is the tendency to read the words instead of saying the color
of ink
• Speaking- more likely to read the word
• Pointing- more likely to point to the color
▪ Change blindness: the failure to detect changes in parts of a scene
• Directors film on different days but no one notices minor changes
like clouds because they are busy focusing on the main thing
o Attention deficit disorder (ADD): easy distraction, impulsiveness, moodiness, and
failure to follow through on plans
o Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): the same except with excessive
activity and “fidgetiness”
▪ Caused by fetal alcohol exposure, lead poisoning, epilepsy, or emotional
stress
▪ Have greater overall brain activity
o Two tasks that people with ADD or ADHD have trouble with:
▪ Would you prefer a small reward now or large reward later? Usually chose
the immediate reward (unless it’s a large difference in amount)
▪ Stop signal
• Categorizing: putting things into categories to make our thinking more efficient.
o Prototypes: are familiar or typical examples that help us justify putting things in a
certain category.
o Conceptual networks and priming: we represent words or concepts with links to
related concepts. Thinking
▪ Spreading activation: the process in thinking about one of the concepts
shown in this figure will activate, or prime, the concepts linked to it.
• When you think of slower, you are primed to think of rose, violet,
and other flowers. If you hear reed, the combination of flower and
red primes you to think of rose.
▪ Priming: a concept to getting it started
• Reading or hearing one word makes it easier to think or recognize
a related word. Seeing something makes it easier to recognize a
related object
• Most important in language (i.e. when you are having trouble
understanding a word, you use context clues)
Module 8.2: Solving Problems and Making Decisions
• Daniel Kahneman described human thinking in terms of two systems
1. System 1/Type 1 thinking: quick, automatic processes (recognizing faces) and for
questions we think are easy- little effort
a. Relies heavily on heuristics, strategies for simplifying a problem and
generating a satisfactory guess (i.e. guess which is the oldest child→ pick the
tallest one. If one product is more expensive than the other→better quality)
i. Not always reliable though
