Monday, October 14, 2013

Week 6 - Cognition, Language, and Intelligence: How Do We Think?

Thinking: Cognition is the way we store and use information. Knowledgeises the mental representations of the world we have stored in long-term memory. Thinking is the use of knowledge to accomplish a goal. Concepts are mental categories. Three levels of catergorization: superordinate (broad), basic level category, and the superordinate (most specific).
Reasoning, Decision Making, and Judgement: Deductive reasoning means reasoning from the general to the specific, whereas inductive reasoning means reasoning from the specific to the general. Decision making means choosing among several alternatives.
Problem Solving: Algorithm is a way of solving a well-structured problem that always leads to the correct solution. A heuristic is a shortcut that may or may not lead to the solution. Ill-structured problems must be solved by heuristics. Insight, creativity, and incubation help us overcome common obstacles to problem solving such as functional fixedness and mental sets.
Lanugage: Research indicates that infants generally proceded from cooing to babbling to morphemes. The Whorfian hypothesis sugguests that language determines one's thoughts sand perceptions of the world.
Intelligence: Alfred Binet established the measurement of mental age that reflected a child's mental abililtes compared to the average. Lewis Terman revised these testing procedures and introduced the intelligence quotient (Or IQ), which is obtained by dividing one's mental age by one's chronological age.
I accomplished a lot this week, but if I don't hurry and close this, I'm going to miss my bus for the volleyball game! Next week will be two chapters based on motivation and development1 :)

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