Syntax refers to the rules governing the ways words can be combined to create meaningful sentences. Content words are words that provide meaning to the sentence. Language production refers to a number of processes by which we convert thought into language output, in the form of speech, sign language or writing. Social cognition refers to the ways in which people make sense of themselves and of others in order to function effectively in a social world. Speech production proceeds in a top-down manner, also known as conceptually driven.
Language is important for information sharing and promoting social interaction. Language can be used through writing and speech. Mental lexicon is our store of knowledge about words and their uses. Linguistic universals are linguistic features said to be found in all languages. There are several linguistic universals, such as consonants, vowels, negatives, questions and so on. Tonal languages are languages that use changes in tone to alter the meaning of the word, in addition to vowels and consonants. Hockett’s design features for human language consists of a set of properties. Some are shared with animals, but only human language uses the full set. It includes things such as rapid fading, interchangeability and feedback. Functional reference refers to the use by animals of a specific call to stand for a specific object or threat.
Language is a structured system which uses a finite set of sounds to construct words, sentences and conversations. There are several components of language:
There are strong universals in turn-taking patterns across languages and suggest a common pattern whereby the gaps between turns, and overlaps, are minimized. Grice described four conversation rules or maxims:
If the maxims are violated, more cognitive processing is required to determine the response. Violation of the maxims provides the basis of humour (e.g: sarcasm is the violation of the maxim of quality). Connotations refer to the non-literal aspects of word meaning and reflect social and cultural factors that affect the literal processing of word meaning.
Aphasia is the term given to a group of speech disorders that occur following brain injury. Disfluency is hesitation or disruption to the normal fluency of speech. Dysfluency is an abnormal disruption to fluency as a result of brain damage. About 6 in 100 words are affected by disfluency. The use of pauses varies with context, task demands and from individual to individual. A clause is a part of a sentence containing a subject and verb. If people want to find out whether someone is lying, it is better to look at the speech than at other cues.
Parapraxes are slips of the tongue or other actions originally thought to reflect unconscious motives. Errors rarely jump across phrase boundaries. Morpheme exchange mostly happens within clauses. The lexical bias refers to the tendency for phonological speech errors to result in real words. Syntax has a large influence in speech errors, as content words get exchanged with content words, function words with function words and so on.
The tip of the tongue state is a temporary inability to access a word from memory. In the TOT state, the target word is a known word. A feeling-of-knowing is a subjective sense of knowing that we know a word and is an example of meta-memory. Bilinguals produce more cross-language intrusion errors when using their non-dominant language, while very few intrusions occurred when they spoke in the dominant language.
There are a number of stages to speech production:
A lemma is an abstract word form that contains syntactic and semantic information about the word. A lexeme is the basic lexical unit that gives the word’s morpho-phonological properties.
Garret’s model is a serial theory. Serial theories propose that speech production progresses through a series of stages or levels, with different types of processing being completed and each level. According to Garret’s hierarchical model, speech is produced via a series of stages, proceeding in a top-down manner. According to this model, speech production consists of five steps:
This model does not predict errors that occur across levels. Non-plan internal errors occur when the intrusion is external to the planned content of the utterance (e.g: saying something wrong, because you happen to see it right now). Levelt’s model consists of six stages:
There is monitoring until the sixth stage. This model explains errors as the failure of monitoring. Dell’s model uses the concept of spreading activation in a lexical network to show how competing activation across different levels might predict speech errors. Processing is interactive in this model and processing is parallel. There are four levels in Dell’s model: semantic level, a syntactic level, a morphological level and a phonological level. Lexical access involves six steps:
Word substitutions occur because a semantically related, but incorrect, choice achieves a higher activation than the target word.
Neurolinguistics is the study of the relationship of brain function to language processing. The lateralization of function refers to the asymmetric representation of a cognitive function in the cerebral hemispheres of humans and higher primates. Language is processed on the left and spatial processing is on the right. When a cognitive function is lateralized, one cortical hemisphere is dominant for that function. The dichotic listening task is one where different stimuli are presented to each ear. There is a right-ear advantage for verbal stimuli. The right hemisphere is involved in the emotional aspects of speech, prosody and aspects of non-literal speech.
The Wernicke-Geschwind model is a simplified model of language function used as the basis for classifying aphasia disorders. It notes a number of key areas for language. The model proposes that we repeat a heard word by processing of the following sequence of brain areas. Following processing of the word in the auditory cortex, information about word meaning is processed in Wernicke’s area and the output is sent to Broca’s area. Broca’s area prepares the speech output and a motor program for output is then articulated via the motor cortex.
Aphasia refers to a language deficit as the result of brain injury. Crossed aphasia refers to language dysfunction following right hemisphere damage in a right-handed individual. Aphasic disorders can be classified according to whether they are fluent, non-fluent or pure. In pure disorders, a particular facet of language is affected, while other language functions remain intact. The fluent disorders are characterized by fluent, but meaningless speech and the non-fluent disorders are characterized by non-fluent, but meaningful speech. There are several types of aphasia:
Writing requires access to the orthographic form of a word rather than its phonological form. Composition is a process by which ideas are turned into symbols. The Hayes and Flower model of writing proposes a cognitive model of writing that focuses on three main domains affecting the writing process: task environment, long-term memory and the immediate cognitive aspects of the writing process. They also propose three general stages of writing: planning, translating and reviewing.
This bundle contains everything you need to know for the fourth interim exam of Introduction to Psychology for the University of Amsterdam. It uses the book "Cognitive Psychology by K. Gilhooly, F. Lyddy, and F. Pollick (first edition)". The bundle contains the following chapters:
- 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14.
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Cognitive Psychology by K. Gilhooly, F. Lyddy, and F. Pollick (first edition) – Summary chapter 8
The motor system includes the components of the central and peripheral nervous system along with the muscles, joints and bones that enable movement. Motor control is the study of how body movements are planned by the brain and performed by the body. Woodworth stated that there were two phases: an impulse phase in which the brain calculates the necessary movements and a control phase where vision is the key to accuracy.
The degrees of freedom of a joint is the number of ways it can move. The degrees of freedom problem refers to the choice of how to move the body when there are countless possible ways to do so. There are several theories of movement planning:
The associative chain theory states that the end of one particular action is associated with stimulating the start of the next action in the sequence, much like a chain. This theory explains how sequences of action arise from linking together associations between individual action components. This theory becomes problematic when one action has to produce multiple other actions. Langley stated that there is a hierarchy of actions, most clearly shown in language production and speech. Parallel processing is the ability to divide the process of solving a problem into multiple parts and work simultaneously on each part. Estes states that each node of the hierarchy corresponds to a particular action schema.
The use of hierarchical structures becomes problematic when explaining how currently desired units can
.....read more Cognitive Psychology by K. Gilhooly, F. Lyddy, and F. Pollick (first edition) – Summary chapter 9A problem is a situation in which you have a goal but do not know how to achieve it. Thinking is a process of mental exploration of possible actions and states of the world. Problems can be well-defined problems or ill-defined problems. Well-defined problems are problems in which starting conditions, actions available and goals are all completely specified. Ill-defined problems are problems in which starting conditions, or actions available or goals are not completely specified. Problems can be knowledge-rich or knowledge-lean. Knowledge-rich problems are problems that require extensive specialist knowledge. Knowledge-lean problems are problems that do not require specialist knowledge. Problems may also be classified as non-adversary or adversary problems. Non-adversary problems are problems in which the solver is dealing with inert problem materials with no rational opponent. Adversary problems are problems in which the solver has to deal with a rational opponent.
There are two main historical approaches that are influential in problem-solving and thinking:
The Gestalt approach. This approach to thinking likens problem-solving to seeing new patterns. It stresses the role of insight and understanding of problem-solving. The key process was restructuring. This changing how one represents a problem. A restructuring that leads to a rapid solution is insight. The path to insight is often characterised by restructuring the overall problem in sub-problems. Set is a tendency to persist with one approach to a problem. Functional fixity is a difficulty in thinking of a novel use for a familiar object.
The information processing approach. The problem space is an abstract representation of possible states of a problem. There are two sub-types: state-action spaces (upside-down tree diagram) and goal-subgoal spaces. State-action space is a representation of how problems can be transformed from starting state through intermediate states to the goal The goal-subgoal space is a representation of how an overall problem goal can be broken down into subgoals and sub-subgoals. Three methods can be used to analyse the state-action tree:
The method of hill-climbing uses intermediate evaluations. This is a heuristic method. A heuristic is a problem-solving method that often finds a low effort solution but is not guaranteed to solve the problem. Problems with
.....read more Cognitive Psychology by K. Gilhooly, F. Lyddy, and F. Pollick (first edition) – Summary chapter 10Decision making is the cognitive process of choosing between alternative possible actions. The normative approach to decision making attempts to establish ideal ways of deciding what will give the best decision possible. Descriptive approaches aim to describe how decisions are actually taken as against how they should be made. A risk in decision making is the possibility of a negative outcome. A riskless decision involves choices where the outcomes of the choices are known with certainty. Single attribute decision problems involve alternatives that vary in only one dimension. The multi-attribute decision problem is a decision task in which the alternatives vary in many dimensions or aspects. The expected value is the long-term average value of a repeated decision, which is determined by probability and the size of the outcome.
The expected value theory works like a charm for decisions that involve money, but it does not comply with human behaviour. Human behaviour seems to follow risk aversion. This is avoiding risky choices even when a higher expected value than riskless alternatives. Risk seeking is a preference for risky choices even when riskless alternatives of a higher value are available. Risk aversion is mostly used when choices are phrased positively. Risk seeking is mostly used when choices are phrased negatively. Utility is the subjective value of an option. Subjective probability is how likely a person believes an outcome to be irrespective of the objective probability.
The prospect theory is a decision theory stressing relative gains and losses (e.g: 10$ means more to a poor person than to an extremely rich person). This theory uses loss aversion. This is that there is a greater dislike of losing utility than liking for gaining the same degree of utility (e.g: losing $10 would feel worse than winning $10 would feel good). Loss aversion is shown in the endowment effect, the tendency to over-value a possessed object and to require more money to sell it than to buy it in the first place (e.g: people don’t want to sell something precious to them for the price which they bought it for). The status quo bias is a tendency to prefer the current state of affairs and this also shows loss aversion.
Objective probabilities are transformed into subjective probabilities, also called decision weights. People tend to overweight small probabilities (e.g: the chance of dying because of a shark attack) and underweight big probabilities (e.g: the chance of dying because of heart disease). Framing effects in decision making occur when irrelevant features of a situation affect the decisions that are made (e.g: something being described positively or negatively). Invariance is the principle that choices should not be affected by how the options are described.
There are two major probabilities often used in making probability judgements:
Cognitive Psychology by K. Gilhooly, F. Lyddy, and F. Pollick (first edition) – Summary chapter 11Reasoning is the cognitive process of deriving new information from old information. Deductive reasoning is drawing logically necessary conclusions from given information. It’s going from the general to the specific. Inductive reasoning is the process of inferring probable conclusions from given information. It’s going from the specific to the general. Premises are statements assumed to be true from which conclusions are drawn. Valid arguments are those in which the conclusions must be true if the premises are true.
Deductive reasoning has two types:
Inference rules are rules for reaching a conclusion given a particular pattern of propositions. There are multiple inference rules:
There are two main mistakes:
People are better at reasoning with the modus ponens (100%) than with the modus tollens (60%). The two fallacies are rejected in about 25% of the cases. It could be that people do poorly on the modus tollens because of misinterpretation of the premises. The ‘if’ is often interpreted as ‘if and only if’. When more antecedents are added, then the fallacies are suppressed. This is called the suppression effect.
Braine argued that people have mental logic rules that they can apply to solving reasoning problems. He argued that people have a set of mental inference rules or schemas that permit direct inferences. They include the modus ponens, but not the modus tollens.
The mental models approach is the view that people tackle logical reasoning problems by forming mental representations of possible states of the world and draw inferences from those representations. Mental models are used for reasoning and the more mental models reasoning requires, the more difficult it will get for people. People minimise the load on the working memory by tending to construct mental models that represent explicitly only what is true and not what is not true. This can cause people to draw the wrong conclusion when they have to answer questions about things that are implicitly not true according to the premises. The principle of truth leads people to form models in which
.....read more Cognitive Psychology by K. Gilhooly, F. Lyddy, and F. Pollick (first edition) – Summary chapter 12Syntax refers to the rules governing the ways words can be combined to create meaningful sentences. Content words are words that provide meaning to the sentence. Language production refers to a number of processes by which we convert thought into language output, in the form of speech, sign language or writing. Social cognition refers to the ways in which people make sense of themselves and of others in order to function effectively in a social world. Speech production proceeds in a top-down manner, also known as conceptually driven.
Language is important for information sharing and promoting social interaction. Language can be used through writing and speech. Mental lexicon is our store of knowledge about words and their uses. Linguistic universals are linguistic features said to be found in all languages. There are several linguistic universals, such as consonants, vowels, negatives, questions and so on. Tonal languages are languages that use changes in tone to alter the meaning of the word, in addition to vowels and consonants. Hockett’s design features for human language consists of a set of properties. Some are shared with animals, but only human language uses the full set. It includes things such as rapid fading, interchangeability and feedback. Functional reference refers to the use by animals of a specific call to stand for a specific object or threat.
Language is a structured system which uses a finite set of sounds to construct words, sentences and conversations. There are several components of language:
Cognitive Psychology by K. Gilhooly, F. Lyddy, and F. Pollick (first edition) – Summary chapter 13Speech perception is the process by which we convert a stream of speech into individual words and sentences. The objective when either listening or reading is to understand what is being communicated. Prosody refers to the rhythm, intonation and stress patterns in speech.
There are few clear boundaries between words in spontaneous speech and sounds blend together as they are produced. Words in speech are not presented as distinct units. We understand everyone’s speech as language, although there are a lot of differences between people, such as sex, age, accent and so on. Recognition of the word precedes the completion of the heard word. Research into the amplitudes of words shows that there is no clear boundary between words.
There are two major problems of speech perception:
The foreign accent syndrome is a syndrome resulting from brain injury in which a person’s speech sounds like the accent of a foreigner. Infants tend to show a preference for their native language over an unfamiliar language. The development of word recognition requires the extraction of the regularities in a language that can be reliably used to distinguish word boundaries. Phonotactic constraints describe the language-specific sound groupings that occur in a language (e.g: some things are not allowed in a language: no English word starts with ‘XR’ and this can give a cue about word boundaries). Onset of a word is the initial phoneme or phonemes.
Slips of the ear occur when we misperceive a word or phrase in speech. It occurs when there is a misperception of a word boundary. These kinds of slips are also called mondegreens. Segmentation of incoming speech is biased towards the dominant patterns of the native language. Disfluency in speech can aid comprehension, as it can give the listener a cue that a less predictable word is coming.
Categorical perception is categorizing the incoming sound in a known category. This helps counteract the invariance problem. We are more sensitive to differences in speech sounds across phonetic categories than within. Voicing is when speech sounds are produced
.....read more Cognitive Psychology by K. Gilhooly, F. Lyddy, and F. Pollick (first edition) – Summary chapter 14Emotion refers to a number of mental states that are relatively short-lived and are associated with an eliciting event. There are four key features of emotions:
Emotions provide us with essential feedback on the execution of our plans relative to our goals. Emotions have not been studied a lot, because it was first seen as irrational and it is difficult to study. The amygdala (fear), the orbitofrontal cortex (anger) and the cingulate cortex (sadness) are involved in emotions. The insula has been linked to disgust. The default network is a network of brain regions that is active when the person is not focused on the external environment. The salience network is involved in monitoring the external and internal environment to allow detection of salient stimuli.
Emotions are to some extent culture-dependent. Display rules are social conventions governing how, when and with whom emotions may be expressed in society. There are core emotions that are universal. The core emotions are anger, disgust, fear, happiness and sadness. Emotional leakage refers to the unintended expression of emotion or a failure to mask emotion. Masked emotions are associated with more inconsistent expressions and an increased blink rate. The emotional responses someone has when depressed is culturally determined, as being depressed also means not being able to regulate the emotional expression in line with the cultural norms.
Clore and Ortony propose that human emotions are characterized by four components:
There are several theories on the relationship between emotion and cognition. There are two early theories of emotion and cognition:
The catharsis myth is the mistaken idea that aggressive behaviour is an effective means of
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