COGNITION AND LANGUAGE

Cognitive psychology focuses on the study of higher mental processes, including thinking, language, memory, problem solving, knowing, reasoning, judging and decision making.

Thinking and reasoning

What is thinking? Psychologists define thinking as the manipulation of mental representations of information.  Cognitive psychologist state that there are mental images which means representations in the mind of an object or event. They are not just visual representations, also could be our ability to hear. Concepts help us to categorize the world. Concepts enable us to organize complex phenomenon into simpler, and therefore more easily usable. Prototypes are representative examples of concepts. For example, I highly typical prototype of the concept ‘’furniture’’ is a chair, while a stove is not a good prototype. Which prototype do you prefer, it depends on  your culture (in which do you live).

People use algorithms which guarantees a solution to a problem, while heuristic doesn‘t guarantee, it just may lead to a solution.. For example some students students use heuristic method while preparing for a test by ignoring textbook reading and only studying their lecture notes.

Problem solving

• There are 3 steps of problem solving : preparation,  production, judgment. Preparation means understanding and diagnosing problems. Production means generating solutions and judgment evaluating solutions. If the solution is clear we will know immediately how to solve the problem. If the solution is less concrete evaluating the situation is quite difficult. In this way we have to decide which alternative is the best.
•  There are three categories of problems: arrangement, inducing structure, transformation. If we cannot retrieve or do not know the solution, we must generate possible solutions and compare them with information in long- and short term memory.

• Insight is a sudden awareness of the relationships among various elements.  Especially, Kohler emphasizes insight in his research with chimpanzees.

Language

What is language?  No wonder that psychologists pay attention to studying language. Language is defined as the communication of information through symbols arranged according to systematic rules. So, if we want to understand how language develops and relates to thought, we have to know the grammar.  Grammar is the system of the rules, then we use grammar we can express our thoughts. Phonology is the study of the smallest units of speech, called phonemes. The third major component of language is semantics (the meanings of words and sentences).

How infants use language? They are babbling, and it helps them to produce actual words. After 1 year of age they use two- words combinations. By age 5 infants have an basic rules of language. However, they are not able to comprehend and use full vocabulary.

There are three opinions of language.

Learning theorists suggest that language is affected by reinforcement and conditioning. Nativist approach says that  all the worlds languages have an universal grammar. So, it means that our language awareness is inborn. According to Linguistic-relativity hypothesis our language shapes and may determine the way people think about the word.

To sum up, the study of cognition occupies a central place in the field of psychology, encompassing a variety of areas- including thinking, problem solving, decision making, creativity, language, memory and intelligence.