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Summary PSYC 102: Introduction to Developmental, Social, Personality, and Clinical Psychology Summarized Textbook Notes
Summarized textbook notes for chapters 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. 74 pages in total.
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Ch.8- Thinking, Reasoning, and Language8.1- Thinking and Reasoning
Thinking- any mental activity or processing of info
Cognitive Economy
- Invest as little mental energy as possible. Fast and frugal thinking
- Mentally economize in ways that reduce our mental effort but enable us to get things
right most of the time
- Our minds use heuristics (shortcuts) to increase thinking efficiency
- Can’t pay attention to everything or else our minds get overwhelmed
- Allows us to simplify things and keep the info we need to keep decision making at a
minimum
Heuristics and Biases
- Cognitive bias: systematic error in thinking
- Representative heuristic: judging the probability of an event based on how prevalent
the event was in past experience
- Eg. we think a shy, awkward chess player is a math major rather than a psych
major
- Base rate: how common a behavior/characteristic is
- We’re bad at considering base rate info
- Availability heuristic: estimating the likelihood of an occurrence based on how easily it
comes to mind
- Eg. higher density of trees on campus or in downtown? On campus bc you
compared the mental images of trees on campus and downtown, and images of
trees on campus came to mind more often
- Eg. ppl think beer has more calories than peanuts. But really, half a cup of
peanuts have more calories than a pint of beer
- Hindsight bias: tendency to overestimate how accurately we could’ve predicted smt
happening once we know the outcome
- I knew it all along, hindsight is 20/20
- Confirmation bias: tendency to seek out evidence that supports our beliefs and to deny
evidence that doesn’t
Top-Down Processing
- Def: Filling in gaps of missing info using our experience and background knowledge
- Bottom-up processing: our brain processes the info it receives and slowly constructs
meaning from it by building up understanding through experience
- Concepts: our knowledge and ideas about objects, actions, and characteristics that
share core properties
- Eg. properties that all motorcycles share
- Eg. meets a dog and knows that all dogs bark and pants when they’re hot
- Frees us of engaging in more complex reasoning over basic knowledge
, - Schemas: concepts that we’ve stored in our memories about how certain objects,
actions, and ideas relate to each other
- Helps us to organize events that share core features (eg. visiting the zoo)
- Lets us know what to expect in a given situation
How Does Language Influence Our Thoughts?
- Linguistic determinism theory: Thought is represented verbally so language defines
our thinking
- Eg. mentally labelling someone as distressed, rather than hysterical makes us
think of them differently
- Linguistic relativity theory: characteristics of language shape our thought processes
- Eg. language can affect thinking: Russian immigrants living in the U.S. remember
events that happened in Russia better in Russian, but also remember events that
happened in the U.S. better in English
- Eg. language does not affect thinking: in English, we have categories for colours
(eg. red, blue, green) but in Papua New Guinea, people only say dark and bright
but can still distinguish colours
8.2- Decision Making and Problem Solving
Decision Making
- Higher order cognition
- System 1 thinking: rapid and intuitive
- Eg. I like ranch more than mayonnaise
- System 2 thinking: slow and analytical
- Eg. where to go for college
- Paralysis by analysis: overanalyzing rather than going with our gut sometimes
confuses us and we make the wrong decision
- Evaluating scientific claims need more careful analysis
- Framing: the way a question is formulated, can influence the decisions people make
- Eg. both questions are the same, but one emphasizes survival while the other
one emphasizes death
- Neuroeconomics: how the brain works while making financial decisions using an fMRI
- Helps us understand why decision making can go wrong
Problem Solving
- Def: generating a cognitive strategy to accomplish a goal
Approaches to Solving Problems
- Algorithms: step by step learned procedures to solve a problem
- Eg. making a sandwich
- But it can be inflexible if you run out of bread, for example
- Break down a problem into subproblems that are easier to solve
- Use reasoning and draw analogies (eg. ran out of bread so use bagels instead)
,Obstacles to Problem Solving
- Salience of surface similarities: focussing on the surface level properties of a problem
- Eg. solving an algebra word problem the same way we solve problems with
similar surface characteristics
- We need to ignore surface features and focus on underlying reasoning
- Mental sets: being stuck in a specific problem solving strategy
- Having trouble thinking outside the box
- Eg. the cup experiment where ppl are given the formula, A-B-C-C= target amount
but after solving a few problems using the formula, they can’t solve another
problem without using the exact formula
- Give people actual cups to break out of their mental set bc some ppl have better
visual spatial skills
- fMRI shows that breaking free of a mental set depends on the frontal and parietal
lobes
Functional Fixedness
- Def: difficulty conceptualizing that an object typically used for 1 purpose can be used for
another
- Eg. using chopsticks to tie up hair instead of for eating
- Helps us discover new opportunities that may have to offer
- Uses conventional objects in unconventional ways
Models of the Mind
- We can draw inferences that computers can’t (eg. the computer hears “I frog” but when
someone forgets smt and says it sounds like “I frog”, we know they actually mean “I
forgot”)
- Computers can’t explore and interact with the world (eg. telling someone that they’re a
jerk provokes a different emotional response than telling someone that you’re upset
about smt they said)
8.3- How Does Language Work?
The Features of Language
- We need all 4 following levels to communicate effectively
- Phonemes (the ingredients): sounds of our language
- Sounds that our vocal cords make
- Morphemes (the menu items): the smallest units of meaningful speech
- They string phonemes together (eg. dog)
- Conveys info about semantics (meaning derived from words and sentences)
- Eg. ish means to a moderate degree (eg. pinkish, warmish)
- Syntax (putting together a meal): the grammatical rules that govern how we compose
words into meaningful strings
- Eg. I ate pizza for dinner follows the syntactic rules of English, while pizza ate I
for dinner does not follow English syntax
, - Grammatical elements can modify words (eg. ing means ongoing action)
- Extralinguistic info (overall dining experience): elements of communication that
aren’t part of the language content but are needed to interpret its meaning (eg. facial
expressions, tone of voice)
- It’s awful in here! This can mean it smells bad in here if someone is holding their
nose or it can mean the room is hot if someone is sweating and wiping their
forehead
- Regional/cultural differences in language dialects
- Ppl’s different ways of speaking depending on their location is not wrong and
shouldn’t be prejudiced
- Eg. Newfoundlanders say “where ya at” instead of “where are you”
- Dialects: variations of the same language used by ppl from specific areas (eg.
Mandarin and Cantonese)
How Do Children Learn Languages?
- Fetuses can learn the melody of their mother’s native language and can recognize their
mother’s voice, as well as specific songs and stories
- Tested by the high amplitude sucking procedure where babies suck on their pacifier
more when they hear their mother’s voice or their native language
- Perceiving and producing the sounds of language:
- Babbling: any internal vocalization that lacks specific meaning
- Evolves over the 1st year of life
- Helps babies figure out how to move their vocal tracts to generate specific
sounds
- By 10 months, babies’ phoneme categories are much like adult speakers of their
native language
- Learning words: comprehension precedes production
- Children recognize and interpret words before they can produce them bc they
have a limited ability to coordinate sounds (eg. know what an elephant is but
can’t pronounce the word)
- Overextension: applying words in a broader sense (eg. referring to every man as
Daddy)
- Underextension: applying words in a narrower sense (eg. the word cat only
applies to their own pet cat)
- Syntactic development in children
- One word stage: using individual words to convey entire thoughts (eg. “doggie!”
to say, “there’s a doggie” or “where’s the doggie?”)
- By age 2, kids start to combine words into simple 2 word phrases (eg. “more
juice” to request a refill)
- They can understand how word order relates to meaning before being able to
generate sentences
- By preschool age, kids can use sentences with 3 and 4 word combinations as
well as morphological markers like s for plural and ed for past tense
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