Cognitive Processes PSY 334

Cognitive Processes
PSY 334
Chapter 13 – Individual
Differences in Cognition
June 6, 2003
Primates & Language
Nim Chimpsky
Roger Fouts
and Washoe
Noam Chomsky
Neural Evidence
 Studying language acquisition may not
settle the question.
 Some people with aphasias are impaired
forming irregular past tenses, others
regular past tenses (Broca’s area).
 PET imaging shows activity in Broca’s
area only when processing regular past
tenses.
 Only regular verbs may be rule-based.
Language is Not Taught
 Children are not directly taught language


No feedback about their errors.
Learning is inductive – infer acceptable
utterances from experience.
 How do they avoid being misled by
wrong sentences they hear?
 Motherese use is uncorrelated with
language development.
 Language develops under adversity too.
Critical Period
 Do young children learn a second
language faster?

Controlling for amounts and types of
exposure and motivation, older children
(11+) learn faster than younger ones.
 However, mastery of the fine points,
speaking without an accent, depends on
learning at a younger age.
 It is better to learn a language before 10.
Language Universals
 Chomsky – special innate mechanisms
underlie the acquisition of language.


Competence not performance.
Study by seeking universals across
languages.
 Universals -- adjectives appear near the
nouns they modify.

May be based on cognitive constraints not
language mechanisms.
Parameter Setting
 Variability among natural languages can
be accounted for by setting about 100
parameters.
 Language learning consists of acquiring
the settings for these parameters.

Also, acquiring vocabulary.
 Pro-drop parameter:


I go to the cinema (does not drop pronoun)
Voy al cinema esta noche (drops pronoun).
What Develops
 Two explanations for changes in
children’s thinking:


They think better – more working memory.
They know better – more facts.
 Probably both occur, due to neural
changes:


Increase in synaptic connections.
Myelination increases neural transmission
speed.
Cognition and Aging
 Decreases in IQ performance scores
occur after age 20:

Related to speed of response on tests.
 Older adults do better on jobs.
 Age-related declines in brain function:



Cell loss, shrinkage & atrophy.
Compensatory growth of remaining cells.
Brain-related degenerative disorders such
as Alzheimer’s.
Psychometrics
 Measures of performance of individuals
on a number of tasks – examination of
correlations across such tasks.


IQ Tests – Binet, Stanford-Binet, Wechsler
Mental age vs deviation IQ.
 Factor analysis of performance scores:


Crystallized intelligence – increases with
age
Fluid intelligence – decreases with age.
Kinds of Abilities
 Reasoning ability:


Sternberg connects psychometrics to the
information-processing approach.
People who score high on reasoning tests
perform reasoning steps more quickly.
 Verbal ability:


Working memory capacity is related to
verbal ability.
People who recall words more rapidly do
better on verbal ability tests.
Kinds of Abilities (Cont.)
 Spatial ability:


Rate of mental rotation is slower for those
with lower spatial ability test scores.
People with high spatial ability may choose
to solve a problem spatially, not verbally.
 Differences in abilities may result from
differences in rates of processing and
working-memory capacities.

Unclear whether this is innate or a
difference in practice (nature vs nurture).
Gardner’s Multiple
Intelligences
 Gardner proposed that seven different
intelligences are supported by different
kinds of knowledge representation:



Separate neural mechanisms.
Separate developmental histories.
Cross-cultural universals in the display of
such abilities.
 Abilities: linguistic, musical,
mathematical, spatial, bodily kinesthetic,
personal (self-understanding, social).
Critique of Multiple
Intelligences
 Strong evidence for distinct linguistic and
spatial intelligence.
 Mathematical intelligence closely related
to spatial so may not be distinct.
 Remaining intelligences not usually
considered cognitive but may be
universal.
 Gardner argues that intelligence is not
unitary and hard to compare.

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