Cognition and Perception

1. Cognition and Perception Psych 448B 11/12/08

2. Outline: • Children’s categories about the biological world • Dialectical psychology • Reasoning • Emotions • Language and thought: • Talking versus thinking • Whorfian hypothesis • Colors • Numbers • In-class assignment: • Situational versus dispositional reasoning

3. How do Children Reason About the Biological World? • Young Western children (under 7) reason about biological phenomena by applying what they know about humans. • From the ages 7 to 10 they go through a cognitive shift and understand that humans are one animal among many (see Carey, 1995).

4. Anthropocentrism • Carey’s Conclusion: Children think of everything as having human qualities. • Example: • Humans have an omentum inside their bodies. Will other animals also have an omentum? YES • Animals have an omentum. Will humans have one? NO

5. X

6. How early does cultural exposure start? • Often developmental research is assumed to speak to a universal human nature because children are assumed to have had only a little cultural exposure. • Western urban children, who make up the bulk of the developmental database, have very little exposure to real animals, and much exposure to toy or cartoon animals.

7. Early exposure to animals • Researchers studied children from two indigenous tribes in the Americas: the Menominee from Wisconsin and the Yukatek Maya from Mexico (Atran et al., 2001; Coley et al., 1999). • Menominee and Mayan children did not show an anthopocentric bias. • Example: • Humans have an omentum inside their bodies. Will other animals also have an omentum? YES • Animals have an omentum. Will humans have one? YES • The tendency to think of humans as different from other animals may not be innate anthropocentrism. Instead, experiences with animals matters.

8. Naïve Dialecticism • One kind of reasoning, that appears related to holistic reasoning, may have come from China. • Chinese show a relative acceptance for contradiction, which has been termed “naive dialecticism” (Peng & Nisbett, 1999). • This is grounded in a view that everything is connected and is constantly in flux. Symbolized by the yin and the yang, this represents a belief that the universe continually moves back from one opposite pole to the other.

9. Tolerance for Contradiction • According to this view, “Belief A” is connected to and is always changing into its opposite, “Belief Not A.” Hence, there can be no real logical contradiction.

10. Formal logical reasoning • In contrast, Aristotle proposed a different system for dealing with contradiction. • 3 principles of formal logic • Law of Identity: A = A • Law of Excluded Middle: A = B, or A = Not B, these are the only two possibilities. • Law of Noncontradiction: A = Not A. • According to this perspective, there cannot be any contradiction.

11. Cultural differences in formal logic: • Consider the following two arguments: • A: A sociologist who surveyed college students from 100 universities claimed that there is a high correlation among college female students between smoking and being skinny. • B: A biologist who studied nicotine addiction asserted that heavy doses of nicotine often lead to becoming overweight. • How plausible is each argument? A>B • US and Chinese college students were asked to evaluate contradictory pairs of arguments: • Condition 1: Receive A OR B • Condition 2: Receive A AND B

12. In Condition 2 (both arguments): • Americans were more convinced that the stronger argument was correct. • Chinese were less convinced that the stronger argument was correct.

13. Dialectical Emotions (Bagozzi et al., 1999) • “In the past month, what feelings did you have?” • Americans are more likely to feel EITHER positive or negative, but not both “I feel happy” or “I feel afraid” • Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese are more likely to feel BOTH positive or negative • “I feel so happy that I am afraid”

14. Situational Differences in Dialectical Emotions (Leu et al, 2008) • US, Japanese, and Chinese college students read about another student’s life: • Positive Events: “I got the highest score in the class.” • Negative Events: “I interviewed for a job and didn’t get it.” • Euro-Americans pursue pure happiness, whereas East Asians guard against pure happiness.

15. Situational Differences in Dialectical Emotions (Leu et al, 2008) • Cultural differences in dialectical emotions were only found in positive situations. • East Asians are likely to only report feeling both positive and negative feelings in positive situations, not all the time, across all situations.

16. Language and Thought

17. Talking and Thinking • In some ways, talking is an analytic process. We can only specify one idea at a time that are arranged in a sequence. It is difficult to discuss holistic ideas in which there are multiple connections that are simultaneously relevant. • If this is the case, holistic thinking should be impaired more by saying one’s thoughts out loud than would analytic thinking.

18. Please describe this face: Facial recognition as a holistic task

19. Please describe this face: Facial recognition example

20. People who verbally describe a face later do not recognize the face as well as others who do not. Verbal descriptions of faces do not capture the whole of the face (see Schooler & Engstler-Schooler, 1990). Facial recognition example

21. Speech across cultures: • Westernersappear to value the spoken word more than East Asians: • In Judeo-Christian beliefs the “Word” is sacred. • The ancient Greeks viewed knowledge to emerge through the spoken word. • The First Amendment to the US constitution is to protect one’s freedom of speech. • In contrast, East Asians appear to not emphasize speech as a marker of thought: • Lao Tzu said that “He who knows does not speak. He who speaks does not know.” • Various Eastern religions also emphasize silent meditation rather than prayer. • A Korean proverb states that “An empty cart makes more noise.”

22. Does talking interfere with thinking among Asians? (Kim, 2002; 2008) • Participants were asked to solve the Raven’s Matrices IQ test under different conditions: • Think Aloud Condition: 10 items silent, 10 items think out loud • Articulation Suppression: 10 items silent, 10 items while reciting ABCs • Dependent variable: how many correct when talking?

25. Performance on Raven’s Matrices • Thinking aloud versus silence: • Euro-American performance is unaffected. • (US born) Asian-Americans perform worse when they are thinking aloud. • Articulation suppression versus silence: • Euro-Americans performance is worse when reciting the alphabet. • Asian-American performance is unaffected. • This suggests that Asian-American silent thoughts are non-verbal on this task, whereas Euro-Americans are thinking verbally about the task even when silent.

26. Does Language Influence Thought? • Whorfian Hypothesis: • Strong version: Language determines thought. Without access to the appropriate words people are unable to have certain kinds of thoughts. • Weak version: Language influences thought. Having access to certain words influences the kinds of thoughts that one has. • There remains a lively controversy regarding the weaker version of the hypothesis, with much recent evidence coming out in favor of it.

27. Language and Color Perception • Although color exists along a continuum, color terms themselves are discrete. • Color terms vary dramatically around the world, although there are only a limited number of patterns of color terms in all languages.

28. Language and Color Perception

29. If people don’t have a word for green, do they still see green the same way? • The Dugum Dani have 2 color terms (Rosch Heider, 1972). The Dani could learn new color terms that were closer to the prototypes of English color labels, than they could learn new color terms that were further from the English prototypes. • This research was enormously influential in arguing that language is independent of thought. • However, new research has been exploring whether color terms affect perception of colors.

30. Array of Color Samples

34. Study: (Roberson et al., 2000; 2005) • Participants were shown triads of color chips and were asked to identify which two chips were more similar in color. • The chips that they chose from were equidistant in terms of hue, however, on test trials two of the chips crossed a boundary between two different color terms. • The researchers compared how similarly people viewed colors to be based on whether the two chips crossed a color boundary in their own language, or a color boundary in another culture’s language.

35. Blue-Green Stimuli

37. Nol-Wor Stimuli

39. Dumbu-Burou Stimuli

41. Judgments based on whether the color of the chips crossed the boundaries of the color terms in their own language, not other languages.

42. Numerical Cognition and Language • Much of numeric cognition is a cultural invention - for the most part, people have few innate math abilities. Most abilities emerge with cultural learning. • Some cultures do not have number terms beyond 2. For example, the Piraha from the Amazon have number terms that correspond to 1, 2, and many. • What happens when the Piraha are asked to count beyond 3? (see Gordon, 2004).

43. The Piraha were asked to do a series of matching tasks: • Copy lines and match the number • How many nuts remain in a can after seeing that some are removed? • Match a series of knocks. • In general, Piraha had an approximate understanding of magnitude (large versus small). • However, Piraha were only accurate up to small numbers, such as to 3 or 4.

44. The larger the number they were asked to represent, the larger was their error, however, they did show a general sense of approximate quantities. • They often would use their fingers to aid their performance, however, this was highly inaccurate, even for numbers smaller than five. • There is still much debate whether these indigenous tribes cannot represent numbers because they don’t have the number terms (a Whorfian argument) or because they lack the cultural learning.

45. Film Clips

46. In-class assignment

47. Understanding Other People’s Behaviors • Analytic thinking involves understanding objects by focusing on their component parts, whereas holistic thinking involves understanding objects by considering their relations with the context. • The same distinction can be applied to how people come to understand other people. • Explaining people’s behaviors by attending to their personal characteristics is known as a dispositional attribution. • In contrast, explaining people’s behaviors by attending to contextual variables is known as a situational attribution.

48. Situation vs. Disposition • Western participants overly attend to dispositional information compared with situational information when explaining the behavior of others, even when the situational constraints on the person’s behavior are obvious.

49. In one classic study, American students were asked to evaluate an essay writer’s true attitudes by reading an essay that they had written which suported or criticized Fidel Castro (Jones & Harris, 1967). • Participants naturally assumed that the person who wrote the pro-Castro essay had more positive feelings towards Castro than the person who wrote the anti-Castro essay.

50. In other conditions, participants were told of some significant situational constraints on the essay-writers behaviors. • Participants were told that the authors had been assigned their positions (i.e., either pro-Castro or anti-Castro). • Participants watched as another subject was given a pre-written essay (either pro-Castro or anti-Castro), and was asked to read it out loud. • In both conditions, Western participants neglected situational information in favor of dispositional information, assuming that the essays were reflective of the subject’s true attitudes.