CBSE Grade 11 Psychology Chapter 8 Thinking

1. Unit 7B:
Cognition: Thinking, Problem
Solving, Creativity, and
Language

2. Unit Overview
• Thinking
• Language
• Thinking and Language
Click on the any of the above hyperlinks to go to that section in the presentation.

3. Introduction
• Cognition (thinking)
• Cognitive psychologists

4. Thinking

5. Concepts
• Concepts
–Category hierarchies
–prototype

6. Solving Problems
Strategies
• Algorithms
–Step-by-step
• Heuristic
• Insight

7. Solving Problems
Creativity
• Creativity
• Strernberg’s five components
–Expertise
–Imaginative thinking skills
–A venturesome
personality
–Intrinsic motivation
–A creative environment

8. Solving Problems
Obstacles to Problem Solving
• Confirmation bias
• Fixation
–Mental set
–Functional fixedness

9. Making Decisions and Forming Judgments
Using and Misusing Heuristics
• The Representative Heuristic

10. Making Decisions and Forming Judgments
Using and Misusing Heuristics
• The Availability Heuristic

11. Making Decisions and Forming Judgments
Overconfidence
• Overconfidence

12. Making Decisions and Forming Judgments
The Belief Perseverance Phenomenon
• Belief perseverance
–Consider the
opposite

13. Making Decisions and Forming Judgments
The Perils and Powers of Intuition
• Intuition
–Unconscious intuition

14. Making Decisions and Forming Judgments
The Effects of Framing
• Framing
–Framing experiments

15. Language

16. Language
Introduction
• Language

17. Language Structure
Phonemes
• Phoneme
–English about 40 phonemes
–Learning another language’s
phonemes

18. Language Structure
Morphemes
• Morpheme
–Includes prefixes and suffixes

19. Language Structure
Grammar
• Grammar
–Semantics
–Syntax

20. Language Development
When Do We Learn Language?
• Receptive language
• Productive language
–Babbling stage
–One-word stage
–Two-word stage
–Telegraphic speech

21. Language Development
When Do We Learn Language?

22. Language Development
Explaining Language Development
• Skinner: Operant Learning
–Learning principles
• Association
• Imitation
• Reinforcement

23. Language Development
Explaining Language Development
• Chomsky: Inborn Universal Grammar
–Language acquisition device
–Universal grammar

24. Language Development
Explaining Language Development
• Statistical Learning and Critical
Periods
–Statistical learning
–Critical (sensitive) period

25. Thinking and Language

26. Language Influences Thinking
• Whorf’s linguistic determinism
• Bilingual advantage

27. Thinking in Images
• Implicit memory

28. Cognition
= the mental activities associated with
thinking, knowing, remembering, and
communicating.

29. Concept
= a mental grouping of similar objects,
events, ideas, or people.

30. Prototype
= a mental image or best example of a
category. Matching new items to a
prototype provides a quick and easy
method for sorting items into categories
(as when comparing feathered creatures
to a prototypical bird, such as a robin).

31. Algorithm
= a methodical, logical rule or procedure that
guarantees solving a particular problem.
Contrasts with the usually speedier – but
also more error-prone – use of heuristics.

32. Heuristic
= a simple thinking strategy that often allows
us to make judgments and solve problems
efficiently; usually speedier but also more
error-prone than algorithms.

33. Insight
= a sudden and often novel realization of the
solution to a problem; it contrasts with
strategy-based solutions.

34. Creativity
= the ability to produce novel and valuable
ideas.

35. Confirmation Bias
= a tendency to search for information that
supports our preconceptions and to ignore
or distort contradictory evidence.

36. Fixation
= the inability to see a problem from a new
perspective, by employing a different
mental set.

37. Mental Set
= a tendency to approach a problem in one
particular way, often a way that has been
successful in the past.

38. Functional Fixedness
= the tendency to think of things only in
terms of their usual functions; an
impediment to problem solving.

39. Representativeness Heuristic
= judging the likelihood of things in terms of
how well they seem to represent, or
match, particular prototypes; may lead us
to ignore other relevant information.

40. Availability Heuristic
= estimating the likelihood of events based
on their availability in memory; if instances
come readily to mind (perhaps because of
their vividness), we presume such events
are common

41. Overconfidence
= the tendency to be more confident that
correct – to over-estimate the accuracy of
our beliefs and judgments.

42. Belief Perseverance
= clinging to one’s initial conceptions after
the basis on which they are formed has
been discredited.

43. Intuition
= an effortless, immediate, automatic feeling
or thought, as contrasted with explicit,
conscious reasoning.

44. Framing
= the way an issue is posed; how an issue is
framed can significantly affect decisions
and judgments.

45. Language
= our spoken, written, or signed words and
the ways we combine them to
communicate meaning.

46. Phoneme
= in language, the smallest distinctive sound
unit.

47. Morpheme
= in a language, the smallest unit that
carries meaning; may be a word or a part
of a word (such as a prefix).

48. Grammar
= in a language, a system of rules that
enables us to communicate with and
understand others.

49. Semantics
= the set of rules by which we derive
meaning from morphemes, words, and
sentences in a given language; also, the
study of meaning.

50. Syntax
= the rules for combining words into
grammatically sensible sentences in a
given language.

51. Babbling Stage
= beginning at about 4 months, the stage of
speech development in which the infant
spontaneously utters various sounds at
first unrelated to the household language.

52. One-word Stage
= the stage in speech development, from
about age 1 to 2, during which a child
speaks mostly in single words.

53. Two-word Stage
= beginning about age 2, the stage in
speech development during which a child
speaks mostly two-word statements.

54. Telegraphic Speech
= early speech state in which a child speaks
like a telegram – “go car” – using mostly
nouns and verbs.

55. Linguistic Determinism
= Whorf’s hypothesis that language
determines the way we think.