hello everyone and welcome to chapter 7 of the openstack psychology textbook my name is Matthew Poole and I'm an instructor of psychology at Northeast State today we're going overthinking and intelligence so whenever I refer to cognition in this class I'm simply just referring to thinking so it encompasses the processes associated with perception knowledge problem solving judgment language as well as memory so overall this category could be considered cognitive psychology so whenever I refer to cognition simply think of thinking moving forward let's talk about Concepts and prototypes because this is a way in which our brain organizes information so when it comes to Concepts these are categories of linguistic information images ideas or memories so they're mainly used to see relationships among different elements of experience so they can be as complex and Abstract as like the idea of Justice or concrete such as just the different types of birds now we all have heard of the word prototype before and whenever we think of a prototype we typically think of a model of a particular product that's in its beginning stages okay but another way in which we can think of prototype when it comes to psychology is the best example or representation of a concept okay when it comes to Natural Concepts versus artificial Concepts natural concepts are are what's naturally um experienced or created through direct or indirect experience such as our concept of snow but we don't have to um experience snow directly to be able to understand what's no it snow is obviously we've talked about how we learn vicariously through seeing images or watching other people which is why for individuals who live in parts of the world that don't get snow and they watch a movie or TV show and they see snow in that particular film or show they can still understand what snow is it's not just that they have to experience it directly they can experience it through indirect experience now we've also got what's known as artificial Concepts artificial concepts are defined by a specific set of characteristics this is found in mathematics this is like your properties of geometric shapes such as squares triangles Etc so artificial is man-made created by a specific set of characteristics which is commonly found in mathematics okay let's talk about schemata so to give an f excuse me a definition to schema a schema is a mental construct consisting of a collection of related Concepts okay so when a schema is activated we automatically make assumptions about the person object slash situation we all have different schemas about the world we have schemas about cats versus dogs being able to distinguish between the two they're a collection of related Concepts which allows us to help navigate our world okay whenever it comes to roll schema all right we all have different role schemes we make assumptions about how individuals in certain roles will behave so usually whenever we think of a librarian we kind of consider them and assume have biases that they are naturally quiet individuals they enjoy peace they enjoy um being with themselves within themselves and reading a nice book they enjoy literature tremendously okay that's not always the case but we do tend to make assumptions based on people's uh roles in which they hold we make assumptions about how they will behave okay now whenever it comes to event schema this is a cognitive script a set of routine or automatic behaviors all right this is like this is the exact reason why whenever we go into an elevator we don't face the wall we typically face the door and naturally we all have a collective most of people at least have a Collective Agreement that we don't really talk whenever we're in an elevator um maybe some brief pleasantries but we typically do not get into conversation obviously because of its you know brief trip but some people just will not talk at all and that's okay okay now this is also our event schema or cognitive scripts help us distinguish of course whenever we go to different types of restaurants because we're not going to act the same at a fancy restaurant as if we were to uh order or act at a fast food chain such as if you went to a nicer restaurant and you just went up to the podium and you started rattling off an order they'd look at you like you were the like you were just had lost your mind right but at a fast food restaurant that's common practice we go up to the very front where a Podium or a desk is and we order our food and then wait to be serve now at a nicer restaurant of course we go up and the very beginning or that Podium is just to be sat down so thankfully our cognitive scripts will kick in and I know this is very Elementary and simple but it's quite you know important when it comes down to it we need our brain to be able to distinguish between uh different uh cognitive scripts and different events and how we should behave all right on top of this another event schema that's uh hard to break right because these schemas they're they're in our brain and they're it's not easily swayed whenever we have them established for a lot of us whenever we get a notification on our phone we either fill it Buzz or the we hear the ding we have an automatic reaction or impulse to want to check that phone immediately no matter where we're at and so that's why whenever we're driving it's a lot harder to resist whenever we get a text because of that Curiosity you know and so but the thing is you're not supposed to text when you're driving is dangerous as well as you will probably you potentially will get ticketed for texting and driving if you're seen by a police officer but the thing is because we regularly have that impulse where we just naturally pick up our phone whenever we get a notification it can be hard to break even when we're driving and we know we shouldn't okay now let's briefly talk about language so language is a communication system that involves using words and systematic rules to organize those words to transmit information from one individual to another and there are multiple different languages as we all know this but all languages can be broken down into smaller components now the Lexicon of language is the words of a given language so what words are do you typically use and what words do you use in general what you what words are applicable within this language grammar grammar is a set of rules that are used to convey meaning through the use of lexicon so what are the rules in which we can organize these lexicon or these words of a given information to convey meaning now more simply a phoneme is a basic sound unit such as ah and a morphemes are the smallest unit of language that can convey some type of meaning all right and lastly language is constructed through semantics and syntax semantics as you all know probably are the meaning that we derive from morphemes and words okay syntax quite simply the way the words are organized into sentences okay now Noam Chomsky he was somebody who was hugely influential whenever it comes to language development throughout developmental psychology Noam Chomsky proposed that the mechanisms underlying language acquisition are biologically determined okay he thinks that language develops in the absence of formal structure so even if we aren't in a place where we are presented with formal instruction gnome thinks that we have the tendency to naturally want to be able to communicate although we may not form particular words or articulate words we still have the uh desire to want to utilize our voice in a manner that conveys some sort of meaning direction or attention and Noam Chomsky thinks that there's what's known as a critical period this is the proficiency at acquiring language uh is the most maximal earlier in life so I don't know why we teach Spanish or other foreign languages in high school while we begin doing that because to maximize our ability to learn and pick up on language we should be doing it in our earlier years I know it may be a little bit harder for us as far as on the initial end but we'll pick up on it a lot quicker if we were taught or introduced to a foreign language at an earlier age that's just my opinion but you know I'm not in education as far as the making decisions in so if they ever ask my opinion maybe that'll be a suggestion that I make all right moving forward problem solving strategies in general so we have what's known as trial and error algorithms heuristics and so we're going to go through and Define each one of these so as we know whenever we're trying to solve a problem Sometimes the best way to engage in that problem is to just go through trial and error try something until it sticks and at least whenever you go through the process when you try it and you fail you're at least learning what not to do until you do we also have algorithms now we hear about algorithms in our day-to-day life that are you know online that should give us or recommend particular videos to us or and things like that particular ads but what an algorithm is at its Baseline it's just a step-by-step problem-solving formula so whenever these software Engineers computer scientists go in and they are wanting to serve you best and try and get you uh the videos that you want that the algorithm isn't just a video serving you know Hub what it is it's they are creating a step-by-step problem-solving formula so it can navigate what you would prefer to see versus not see and so that has an algorithm has been written in a lot of entertainment Outlets to be able to serve you best heuristics heuristics are General problem solving framework so we all have heard of quite simply shortcuts ways to navigate things a little bit easier get the same result and not have to go through all the same steps that we would in the long form framework we also have rules of thumb we have working backwards so some of us like to solve problems by seeing the problem first and then maybe working backwards from there can help a lot of people out as well something that helps with memory in general is breaking large tasks into a series of smaller steps so maybe not trying to digest a big piece of riding all at once maybe we should break this down sentence by sentence or maybe a few sentences or a paragraph at a time okay moving forward so let's talk about some pitfalls to problem solving or one in particular now if you're like me you probably suffer from what's known as functional fixed in this this is some people's inability to see things were being utilized for more or for anything other than what they were intentionally supposed to be used for so as you can see to the right and figure a you'll see a you'll see some matches you'll see a box of thumb tacks as well as a candle now if I were to ask you hey what I want you to do though with those three items is Mount that candle on a wall and light it now if you struggle with difficulty in doing so you'd probably think like well I don't have an adequate you know candle holder how am I supposed to you know do that I mean I I have matches and I can light the candle but I've got some thumbtacks but I don't have a holder well somebody who can think outside of the box who is more creative what they would do is they use the box that the thumbtacks came in and then place the candle in it so it would stand up now I don't know about you but in figure B that's that holder doesn't look too stable but maybe you can navigate away maybe that's just again my functional fixing this kicking in maybe you'd be able to navigate it in a way to where you can hold that candle a little bit better with that box configure that box in a way that makes it stand up um and and not have the potential to fall over and I guess catch your house on fire but if you're like me and you didn't exactly see that uh problems solving you know you know Outlet initially you may be like me and suffering from functional fixiness and as the uh famous Albert Einstein once said a very big important quote to remember for the rest of your life insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result Amen to that we've got biases now biases are items in our lives that can influence our decision making as well as our argumentation without us really even knowing um they're kind of an unconscious process where we don't really realize that we're engaging in them until we're made known of the fact so let's go through a few of these biases so you can navigate these in the future and like take a pause for yourself and say hey am I engaging in a bias here that can distort my um my ability to reason In This Moment anchoring bias anchoring biases are tendency to focus on one piece of information whenever we make a decision or solve a problem you see people constantly do this where they'll see something that they initially discovered when researching into a topic or they sift through a lot of information and they find about one piece of evidence that supports their claims and so they stick to it like an anchor in a water it keeps them in place they do not sway from it but as we all know most things in life cannot be simplified into support of only one piece of information whenever you make a decision or solve a problem a lot of things have a lot of gray area and there can be argumentation or debate for a lot of topics in our world so usually most things cannot be as simplistic as using one piece of information you have to Branch out and gather more to support your claims at least adequately when it comes to confirmation bias we all have at least heard of this once confirmation biases our tendency to focus on information that only confirms your existing beliefs and sway away from information that tends to go against your beliefs because our beliefs are important to us we usually come get to our belief points from adequate thought effort and a lot of time considering the topic and so you shouldn't be very easily swayed from your beliefs at least initially but something that can influence our tendency to stay in one place is because of confirmation bias whenever we come to that belief system we like to keep it that way we get personal about it and so whenever something goes against or we see information that goes against what we believe in it causes agitation and it may just redirect us to go seek out information that continues to confirm it hindsight bias hindsight bias is whenever you thought something was predictable even though it wasn't so for example I experienced this in the stock market now at the time of recording this is 2023 and the stock market took a huge hit absolutely huge and whenever I first got into the stock market it was 2021 and if you ever look back on how the market was in 21 I mean you could have literally been um throwing money at anything in the market and you would have made money it was an insane time for the stock market now me being a novice Trader and somebody who was just beginning I thought that I was just a genius when it comes to the market but again it was just the flourishing Market at the time and so I would look into things in the different stocks and I would see different pieces of evidence probably not adequate in a normal Market to be looking at and I was like I'll put my money here it would go up I'd sell and I'm like I'm a genius I've I've got you know an ability to navigate this Market how could you know whatever the case is I I was I was way overconfident than I should have been and I thought all of this stuff was way easily predictable even though it wasn't because it doesn't matter who you are as far as a stock broker you don't know whether the Market's going to go up or down things like that so I got a rude awakening whenever our Market took a huge hit at the beginning of 2022 and toward it may have been no it was 2022 and toward about June the market had officially gone down about 20 I'd lost a ton of money and um gas was like close to at least in East Tennessee it was close to five dollars I think at one point I mean it was just insanity and so uh nothing is predictable when it comes to stock market and whenever it comes to market the economy but we can fall victim to that hindsight bias pretty frequently whenever we think things are predictable even though they're not when it comes to the representative bias this is our tendency to unintentionally stereotype someone or something the availability heuristic the tendency to make a decision based on an example information or recent experience that is readily available to you even though it may not be the best example to inform your decision now Sports analysts fall victim to this a lot they Sports is really a what have you done lately for me type of occupation and analysts tend to I've noticed this they tend to base a lot of their opinions on athletes as to what they've done recently rather than their career as a lot as an overall um especially for people who are still currently playing and so um they're making their decisions just based on what's most available or what's most recently happened to this person and uh this is just a bias that a lot of us fall victim to in a variety of ways but I just see it so commonly happening in sports okay so let's classify intelligence what is intelligence so there are a lot of different ways that psychologists have come up with being able to Define intelligence there are multiple different intelligences in general but two overall categories that I want to explain to you so crystallize intelligence this is like your book smarts this is just knowing facts your acquired knowledge and the ability to retrieve it so who is the president of the United States who was the first president of the United States that's just our ability to know uh facts fluid intelligence this is kind of like your street smarts being able to see complex relationships and solve problems this is just knowing how to do something okay so crystallize versus fluid now Robert Sternberg though he thinks that there's three types of intelligences practical creative and analytical so analytical intelligence is like your academic problem solving and computation so that's most relates to like your book smarts your ability to retrieve facts understand complex relationships within an academic setting such as mathematics now your practical intelligence again like your street smarts and Common Sense how are you with people seeing relationships understanding human behavior things like that and then he adds into it creative intelligence we have people who again they don't fall victim as much to functional fix in this they and are Innovative they're imaginative and they problem solve from such a creative standpoint that nobody has introduced before okay we need to create creative people now Howard Gardner proposed that we each have at least eight intelligences in the sense of we have a varying level of them some are higher than the other okay now he thinks the first one is what's known as linguistic intelligent so your ability to use language uh your articulation when it comes to writing speech things of that nature secondly logical slash mathematical some people are mathematically inclined and they see complex relationships within the academic setting and are able to be able to navigate them with relative ease or whenever they persist with being able to understand mathematical equations and items within math they can navigate it eventually they're able to solve problems now some people are musically inclined they are able to sing able to play music they have a natural Rhythm within them that they can keep on a beat and so create it with other people to be able to create a band or music in general so beautiful whenever individuals are talented whenever it comes to with music bodily kinesthetic and um just going back to the musical I think it's if there's one like intelligence or um ability that I could have and let me know if you agree with this is just like with music because when you play music and especially if you can sing you can just capture a room and like everybody stops what they're doing and they will listen to you and I just think that's such a powerful ability and I just I wish that I if there's one talent I can have is sing and uh yeah it would just be really cool to be able to see like what an audience looks like whenever you're you have such an incredible ability like that and they just Zone in to exactly what you're doing in that moment you just command a room and you get to share your talents you know it's it's cool it's funny because I think I I experienced the exact opposite in a classroom whenever I talk about and I'm getting into psychology and although it's interesting to me uh basically all of this stuff I know it's not going to be for everyone and that's okay and I'll look out into the crowd or the not the crowd but the classroom and I'll have people just totally not interested in looking off into the distance or looking out the window on their phone on their laptop and it's just like it's a different world but then you also have those who are locked in and so I guess I get a little bit of a taste of what that's like um but not not exactly to that level now some athletes are bodily and kinesthetic uh intelligent so they have the ability to basically do physics you know as they are performing their sport which is so cool um they have very good depth perception and the ability to perform with their body and engage in athletics very adequately so it's really impressive to athletes are very impressive when they're good at their sport spatial intelligence so again that relates to bodily kinesthetic in the sense of depth understanding uh spaces and things like that your body in relation to other items and where they're at okay related to bodily kinesthetic interpersonal and intrapersonal now individuals who are good with interpersonal skills or interpersonal intelligence they understand the relationship between people so how to navigate and understand what other people want and how to be good with other people emotionally and otherwise all right intra personal is being intelligent regarding yourself okay so this is having more so a awareness as objective as you can be and honest with yourself as you can be being reflective within yourself and trying to understand who you are and what you like and what you don't like a lot of people are not as introspective as you may think and whenever we combine these interpersonal and interpersonal skills these intelligences we call this overall emotional intelligence the again the ability to understand the emotion of yourself as well as others show empathy understand social relationships and cues and regulate your own emotions and respond and culturally appropriate ways all right we also have those who are naturalistically intelligent so those naturalists they enjoy nature they enjoy the individuals and organisms within nature and it's a beautiful sight to see and and engage in whenever you see those who are in tune with their naturalist intelligence these are super caring super kind and various Board of individuals when it comes to Nature okay next is creativity I've talked about this a little bit briefly throughout this lecture but it's the ability to generate create or discover new ideas Solutions and possibilities and some attributes that are related to creative people include having intense knowledge about something they work on it for years they look at novel Solutions and they seek out the advice and help of other experts on top of this something that you may not know about creative people is that they at least a good portion of them tend to take risks all right and so what's often associated with creativity creative people is that they are Divergent thinkers they like to think outside of the box and you use one more than one possibility exists on this situation so like for example with this whenever they are given a problem they like to think of either new ideas or new solutions that haven't been tried out before or they have the ability to see new and better ways to navigate particular situations now convergent thinking this is the ability to provide a correct or well-established answer or solution to a problem so we've got our Divergent thinkers and our convergent thinkers all right so we've all heard of IQ tests before or measures of intelligence so IQ stands for an individual's intelligent quotient and this is like one of the first forms of standardization when it comes to tests and uh Alf Alfred beignet was the individual who developed an intelligence task to use on children to to determine which ones might have difficulty in school all right and then Louis Turman a Stanford psychologist modified beignet's work by standardizing the administration of the test and testing thousands of children to establish a norm and so what we've seen the average IQ for individuals is a hundred but the average Falls within a bell curve and so between 85 to 115 is going to be the average IQ score the overall average is what I say but moving forward with some other measures of intelligence we have the David westler's definition of intent of intelligence which means the global capacity of a person to act purposefully to think rationally and to deal effectively with his environment and so he developed a new IQ test by combining several subsets from other intelligence tasks okay and the main thing that I want you to take away from the slide is what's known as the Flynn effect and so after years of use within schools and communities periodic recalibration of w-a-i-s wesler's you know test led to an observation known as the Flynn effect this is the idea that each generation has a significantly higher IQ score than the last so don't tell your parents that you're smarter than them but whenever you look at the data it suggests that we're continuing to get smarter with each generation that passes okay known as the fun effect as I've mentioned recently in whenever it comes to the bell curve so we have to have when we're doing these testings in general a representative sample so representative sample is a subset of the population that actually represents the general population so when you're Gathering individuals you have to make sure that of course it's random but you have to have a significantly large number of people to be able to prove statistical significance and so whenever it comes to this uh for the bare minimum to prove statistical significance most experiments will require 30 participants but if you want it to be very accurate you're going to need a a significant amount a large amount of people okay now when it comes to the Bell curvature I already described 82 percent of um the population have an IQ score between 85 and 115 okay and so whenever you have uh you're navigating the bell curve is what I should say you you'll have what are known as standard deviations and so whenever you have one standard deviation below or above that's going to include about 82 percent of the population and so as mentioned between 85 and 115 is considered average now the most commonly scored is going to be a hundred that's again the average overall IQ but if you want to be within the average of one standard deviation below and above that's going to be eight between 85 and 115. now if you are two standard deviations above or below that's going to be below average and above average so for individuals who have an IQ score between 115 and 130 they are considered above average now between 70 approximately and then 85 or 84 I should say is you're going to have that's going to be your individuals who are below average now here at 70 and Below that's going to be well below average and then between 1 30 and above that's going to be well above average so that's a brief introduction into the bell curve especially whenever it comes to your IQ all right we're going to end on talking about learning disabilities as well as sources of intelligence so whenever it comes to learning disabilities these are not intelligence disabilities in the sense that if individuals have dysgraphia or dyslexia it doesn't mean that they are not as smart as people they just have learning difficulties that they have to navigate and so whenever it comes to dysgraphia this is whenever individuals struggle to write legibly and so as a result have difficulty putting their thoughts down on paper Okay so they have difficulty with writing legibly and what you're seeing in figure 717 to the right is an example of Dyslexia so what an individual with with dyslexia would view the word teapot so up to the top left that's how it's properly spelled but if you have this Lexia it can look like any of the rest of these where the letters are backwards for upside down you name it and so it's very hard to navigate these words um as a result of having dyslexia and so you'll see people who have dyslexia writing these words out and it'll it'll also be backwards and for and uh upside down and things like that so it's the most common learning disability in children and again characterized by mixing up letters within words and sentences all right but again it's not that individuals um are not intelligent because it often happens to individuals who are above average intelligence which is you know very in as far as the data goes interesting in how that works because I'm telling you one of the smartest people children that I know she has dyslexia but she is very very intelligent and that just goes to show it's not an intellectual disability it is a learning disability okay may slow them down a little bit in regards to that but overall they are very smart okay the source of intelligence now what do you think and how do you think in impacted your intelligence the most was it your parents or was it the school environment that you grew up in this can be characterized and understood by potentially nature or nurture or do you think it was a combination of both you know you're given a particular amount of intelligence from your parents and then that can be facilitated for the better for the average or maybe even for the worst depending on the environment that you go to school in you know the teachers that you have things like that so what do you think do you think mostly your intelligence is due to your environment or your nature uh or is it you know maybe equal with both both of them kind of LED you to where you are today okay moving forward that is going to end our lecture for chapters chapter 7 thinking and intelligence I will see you in the next video for chapter eight I hope you have a good rest of your day bye