4 th Edition Copyright 2004 Prentice Hall8-1 Thinking, Language, and Intelligence Chapter 8.

Copyright 2004 Prentice Hall 8-1

4th Edition

Thinking, Language, and

Intelligence

Chapter 8


Thinking

• Cognitive psychology is the study of thinking.

• Thinking involves manipulation of information that can take the form of images or concepts.

• Visual imagery is the experience of seeing without the object or event actually being viewed.


Thinking

• Concepts are mental representations that facilitate thinking and reduce the number of elements we must consider.

• Concepts may be defined by their properties.

• We usually identify specific examples as members of a concept by judging their degree of similarity to a prototype, or best example, of the concept.


Thinking

• An algorithm is a method of solving problems that involves systematically exploring all possible solutions until the correct one is reached.

• Algorithms can be time-consuming and do not work for problems that are not clearly defined.

• Heuristics are educated guesses or rules of thumb that are used to solve problems.

• Although the use of heuristics does not guarantee a solution, it is more time-efficient than using algorithms.


Thinking

• Try the nine dot problem!

• Connect the nine dots without lifting your pencil from the paper


Thinking

• Rigidity is the tendency to rely on past experiences to solve problems.

• One form of rigidity, functional fixedness, is the inability to use familiar objects in new ways.

• Likewise, set effect predicts that we will attempt to use solutions that have been successful in the past, even when they are not the most effective.


Thinking

• Now try this problem


Thinking

• The way in which information is presented can dramatically alter our decision making; this effect is called framing.


Thinking

• We also make decisions by comparing the information we have received to some standard.

• Heuristics facilitate good decisions but may sometimes result in bad ones.


Thinking

• Creativity depends on divergent thinking, rather than the convergent thinking assessed in tests of intelligence.

• Creative people have a high capacity for hard work, a willingness to take risks, and a high tolerance for ambiguity and disorder.


Thinking

• The business community is interested in enhancing creativity to develop and market products and services.

• The methods used to enhance creativity include engaging in humorous and playful activities.


Thinking

• Which would you judge to be creative


Language

• Between birth and the beginning of formal schooling, children learn to speak and understand language.

• Phonemes are the individual sounds of a language; morphemes are its smallest meaning-bearing elements.

• An understanding of the proper order of words in phrases and sentences demonstrates an understanding of syntax


Language

• There are two major theories of language acquisition: – the notion that language is a learned

response acquired like any other behavior – and the view that children are innately

predisposed to acquire language through a built-in language acquisition device (LAD)


Language

• The linguistic relativity hypothesis suggests that our use of words (and syntax) can influence and even guide thought processes.


Intelligence

• Francis Galton initiated the intelligence testing movement by developing tests based on the assumption that level of intelligence is related to sensory abilities.


Intelligence

• Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon developed an intelligence test to evaluate French schoolchildren.

• They proposed the concept of mental age which compared a child's performance with the average performance of children at a particular age.

• The intelligence quotient (IQ) is the ratio of mental age divided by chronological age and multiplied by 100.


Intelligence

• Binet's tests became the widely used Stanford-Binet test.

• Another set of tests, the Wechsler Scales, yield verbal and performance appraisals of Intelligence.


Intelligence

• The three characteristics of a good psychological test are reliability, validity, and standardization.

• Reliability refers to the consistency of scores obtained on repeated administrations of the test.

• Validity refers to a test's ability to measure what it was designed to measure.


Intelligence

• Standardization refers to uniformity in testing procedures and test scoring.

• Norms provide the distribution of scores of a large sample of people who have previously taken a test.


Intelligence

• Intelligence test scores are distributed in the shape of a bell curve.

• The majority of the scores are clustered around the middle, with fewer scores found at either extreme.


Intelligence

• According to Charles Spearman, we all possess general intelligence (along with specific abilities.

• Robert Sternberg and Howard Gardner propose that we have several types of intelligence, most of which are not measured by current intelligence tests.


Intelligence

• The heritability of intelligence is an estimate of the influence of heredity in accounting for differences among people.

• The heritability of intelligence tends to increase with age


Intelligence

• Yet, even clearly inherited conditions, such as PKU, can be modified by altering a person's environment.

• Correlations between the IQ scores of identical twins suggest that intelligence is strongly influenced by heredity.


Intelligence

• The closer the family relationship, the higher the correlation between the intelligence scores of family members.

• Studies of adopted children suggest that environmental factors also have an effect on intelligence.


Intelligence

• Claude Steele has offered evidence that when taking standardized tests, African Americans may experience stereotype vulnerability.

• This notion suggests that something as simple as a question about one's race may have more significant meaning to African Americans than to other people.

4 th Edition Copyright 2004 Prentice Hall8-1 Thinking, Language, and Intelligence Chapter 8.

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