Born to Chose Article

Jengar article:

• What evidence shows that choice is important?
• People are happy when offered a lot of choices. Choices may be important for self-efficacy, you cant feel effective if you don’t have the opportunity to make choices. Its adaptive for our survival. 
• Studies of the elderly patients who have some elements of control of their environment, people actually live longer in those conditions. A big issue in retirement homes… loss of control is just really massive.
• “Mindless Eating” claiming that we are led into eating too much because we use heuristics to decide how much to eat and those shortcuts are misleading us. So we eat mindlessly. We utilize system 1 (intuition) thinking.. and diets fail disastrously because they force people to use system 2 all the time. Its too attention demanding. We are so driven by our intuitions… so we need to arrange our minds so we eat mindlessly without lead into eating too much.
• choice is critical because choice is rewarding. It gives us a good feeling to be in control in some ways.
• Why do we cling so strongly to the importance of choice and to our right to choice?
• She basically says, that’s sort of just the way we are. Its built into the structure of our brains and minds to want and need that. We don’t have any choice but to believe in choice.
• How are our attitudes effected by our choices?
• If we chose something, then we like it better! If you choose something out of as set, then you end up evaluating it more highly than you did initially.
• Music studies… once they’ve chosen a piece of music, they like it better.
• Its like a justification of our choice.
• What evidence indicates that choice can overwhelm??
• indidviduals were more satisfied with their choices when there was a smaller array of things to choose from.
• If there is an array of 30 jams, people are more likely to buy one from an array of 6.
• We want lots of choice, but when we have it, we don’t really want it that much.
• We are very poor predictors of what we are going to like… 
• When we have a really long list of things that you have, you just have to satisfice instead of thoroughly doing it all.
• You end up wondering if you could have done something better if you had looked longer, etc. Too many choices can be annoying.
• When people are faced with these health care options, people don’t know what the hell to do with them. People don’t actually like what they say they want in terms of healthcare, etc. 
• TED talk: cultural differences. They studied children of first generation parents and other children. They could choose their anagrams, take on the teacher had given them, or take one their mom had picked. American kids did way better when they themselves picked it, but Japanese children were more likely to do well when their parents may have picked it.
• Our culture seemed more obsessed with choice than others.
• Ex. French vs. American parents taking their children off of live support… americans want control but look at it more negatively.
• Still examples of how what we say what we want is not what we end up liking
• 
  

2 lectures: Intuition and Well being

• Lecture 1: This does not account for very much of what people really actually do in decision-making. People use a lot of heuristics in judgments and decision-making tasks. He won the nobel prize in economics. He talked about having debates with economists and debates with psychologsts. With Economists, he wonders how accurate is the normative approach? He is asking to what extent may intuition be truly marvelous? Ex. A firefigther who can tell who things are going to explode, or nurses who say that people have to get to the ER right before they have a heart attack? But there are other times when people’s performances become really flawed.
• Expected Utility theory : main ideas
• completeness 
• We know our preferences so we act in accordance with our preferences.
• Is intuition marvelous or is it flawed? Ex. firefighters or nurses (marvels of intuition).
• Are these feats of conscious reflective judgement?
• He is arguing that they are not, they are probably not on the bases of a conscious reflective process.
• How well can people make predictions about:
• wine quality: you could do, but most people don’t
• value of an art work: could do, but most people don’t
• stock market
• relative success of different students going to professional school or graduate school
• outcomes of judicial proceedings
• economic and political outcomes
• People usually don’t do well at all… an irritate. Major finding: in complex decisions, people and experts are routinely outperformed by simple equations.
• Ex. House of cards: professionals tend to rely on their own opinions, but a lot of it turns out to be wrong.
• For outcomes of judicial proceedings: an equation based on the judge’s behavior did better than the judge himself!
• Our ability to generate predictions is really limited, more than we think it is. They insist that they are experts in ways that they are not.
• These are the flaws in intuition.
• 2 ways that thoughts come to mind: what are those two ways?
• Reason (deliberative process) ((system 2))
• Intuition (automatic process) ((system 1))
• major differences between the two: a speed difference. Intuition is fast, reasoning is slower. Intuition  is automatic, reason is controlled, intuition is effortless, reasoning is effortful. One is learned slowly (intuition), and one is more flexible (reasoning). 
• Intuition is gained over time, but not at a conscious level. 
• What are natural assessments?
• natural assessments are: judgements that we very naturally do, almost automatically without reflecting. On the basis of perceived similarity or familiarity or whether or not its surprising, or the emotional aspect.
• used perceptual illustrations as examples. They are similar to what is happening generally in cognition.
• A couple of towers with child’s building blocks, and an array of blocks on the table
• the two towers looks similar
• but the array on the table looks different, but we realize that they both have the same number of blocks.
• Perceptual popout: some things just leap off the page. 
• Behaviors can start out as system 2 (reasoning) and then become system 1 (intuition). 
• Monitoring of intuitive processes:  How tightly do we check on ourselves and monitor?
• Not so much. It is a rather loose monitoring.
• So what can cause our intuition to fail?
• occupying the working memory or a cognitive load. Ex. stereotype threat.
• We might make a mistake using our intuitive system but we wouldn’t notice it, because we don’t monitor that closely, especially if we are preoccupied.
• What is the role of associations in intuitions?:
• ex. the word vomit. There are a whole series of responses that occur, ex. a flash of disgust on your face or a change in heart rate.
• These are quick responses that presumably over time experience with the word and the things that go with it have become linked… they are associated.
• This then provides an evaluation and provides a basis for an immediate response.
• Associative coherence is important underlying the intuitive response
• These are the basis of a judgment such as looking at a person and saying, are they likely to be a wallstreet banker? You could probably assign a probability to that without knowing exactly why. This is an example of representativeness… matching up our experience to these judgments.
• These judgments can lead to some silly errors too
• How do we become experts, and then capable of great intuition?
• Practice/repetition. 10,000 hours of practice or something, in a variety of different domains.
• Not only practice but also feedback. Immediate unambiguous feedback that tells you that what you did was correct or not. 
• Sometimes people can’t get this kind of feed back, so they can’t become experts, like predicting the stock market, or being an “experienced” clinician who may not have learned what they think they know.
• So how do these associations make us subject to failures of rationality?
• various aspects of associations make us subject to these failures:
• framing effects: the way the facts are presented, showing losses vs. gains, and we have an exaggerated reaction to losses. 
• It’s a failure of our monitoring.
• Discounts vs. surcharges: can portray the same situation as though its good or bad… if you give a comparison price that looks like you’re getting a discount, you’re more likely to buy it and makes us subject to silly decisions.
• You can give a bogus alternative that leads them to a different choice.
• Dan Ariely
• Predictably Irrational
• Your choice depended on your phone number, so if you’re given a stating point, you may find it very difficult to forget that.
• Why in places where driver’s liscence are not automatically donors do they have less donors?
• people just agree with the defaults when they don’t know what else to do.
• He said we are asked complex questions and to response, you answer a simpler question where you can use a short cut, in doing so, we use a heuristic. Perhaps this is not reliable at all
• So intuition can be marvelous in certain situations, but without unambiguous immediate feedback about the quality of your judgment, you may make really bad judgments. 
• Various affective biases play a big role. The classic decision making model shows that we weigh the pros and cons, etc, but in reality, we use shortcuts, etc. 

Lecture 2: wellbeing

• How is wellbeing related to decision-making?
• Decisions that people make to achieve their well being often make it worse.
• People know what they want and what they like, but we can’t really measure subjective wellbeing.
• How has happiness changed as the gross domestic product has gone up?
• It has deceased a bit, and yet people think that more things will make them happy
• How does life satisfaction change before and after marriage?
• It increases before marriage and decreases after marriage. 
• He finds a very sharp contrast between what people say in the moment and what they say after the fact. A well demonstrated phenomena
• The big issue he is raising here is: why are we surprised by these findings? Its as though we don’t have a very good grasp on our feelings or emotions, or not knowing what we will feel in the future, and not knowing what we have felt in the past.
• Bill James:
• figure in baseball (where they take a lot of data on sports in order to see what works, etc) who applies statistics to baseball and has careful attention to equations and deicision making, etc. Not based in intuition
• Major issue: why does this seem surprising to us?
• What do people say about the mood of paraplegics? A month later vs. a year later?
• The people who knew a paraplegic would say that they wouldn’t have so bad of a mood after a year, but someone who doesn’t know a one thought their mood wouldn’t change at all.
• What would people say about mood and winning the lottery?
• but if you know someone who had actually done it, you would predict after the initial mood that their happiness would drop back to normal.
• Having a high household income or being a woman over fourty?
• How well do people predict that they will like eating ice cream after eating it for 8 days straight? They don’t predict their liking any better than a stranger could.
• What determines how much one suffers in a painful situation?
• They thought the duration of the pain was the important factor, but really what is most important is when it was worst and what it was like at the end. 
• Like the cold arm test – people would rather have the long one than the short in the end, because it was more gradual.
• So! there is quite a difference between living an experience and remembering one or thinking about it.
• There is an experiencing self (living the experience) and the evaluating self, but it seems we only keep the evaluating self because we are remembering. 
• Its hard to know which one is more important of if they both are… but what we remember at the end and what we report feeling at the time seem to not at all be the same thing. 
• .4 is the correlation between moment to moment happiness and life satisfaction.
• Time seems to be a major factor for the experience self…
• So what are you thinking about for each?
• they don’t think so much about their experiences how great it is during the fact! Maybe sometime… but it’s a matter of attention. WE are attending to different things in the experiencing self vs. the evaluating self.
• The quality of the experiencing life is having a good time with our friends, and not  a lot of attention toward climate, etc… “
• “nothing in life matters quite as much as you think it does when you’re thinking about it.”
• The evaluating self greatly exaggerates things. 
• The focusing illusion: the idea of directing your attention to certain aspects of the situation and thinking that those are really the important aspects for a decision. 
• We tend to direct our attention to just certain aspects.
• ex. having a nice salary and having a nice car would make you happy, but here we are just focusing on a limited number of aspects that don’t necessarily relate to your wellbeing.
• How much pleasure do you get from your car? It turns out to correlate with the bluebook value of the car. 
• How much did you enjoy your commute this morning? Then there is no correlation with the blue book value of the book at all! The bulk of the everyday experience with their car doesn’t seem to relate to their enjoyment of the car.
• So, he has many examples that our feelings and the feelings that we imagine that we would have are not at all the same. We are very poor predictors of our feelings, and we remember our past feelings very differenetly than we would have reported them at the time.
• So how does this relate to decision making?
• These are all issues that were dismissed in classical decision making theory, they  thought we knew what we wanted and liked and those preferences would be evident in our choices… but here we see that we are often of two minds not knowing what exactly we would want. 
• Its interesting to see this much literature on emotion and decision making… 20 years ago it would not have existed so much.

Reasoning and Decision making

• Reasoning and Decision Making wiki ch
• So, what is reasoning? 
• Differences between deductive and inductive reasoning? See table
• Deductive: going from general facts or general principles, and conclude more specifics. If the premises are true, the conclusion must be true.
• Inductive reasoning: based on observations of specific cases, and the conclusions are more general. Lead to a conclusion that is probably true (the bread and butter of science and experiments). Based on evidence instead of proved facts.
• Normative vs. descriptive approaches to reasoning.
• Normative approach is based on logic and deals with valid or invalid statements. Normative is saying how people SHOULD think. Here there is a standard of how to do syllogistic reasoning..
• Descriptive is based on how people DO think. People often don’t follow the normative standard.
• So, why do people do so badly in terms of syllogistic reasoning
• Wason Selection Task: 4 cards … following the rules and people do really badly on this task, which is similar to affirming the antecedent.
• The Florida Drinking Age problem : griggs turns that task into real world contexts, and performance is better in the case of real-world items.
• Illustrates that people are not attending to the form as much as the content. Deduction relies on the form of the argument only, not whether it is right or wrong. But, they do respond to the form of the argument when they are in real world terms.
• Perhaps based in an evolutionary preparation for certain things, or a permission schema or a cheater.
• Generally we don’t do very well with deductive reasoning.
• Inductive reasoning: quality of the evidence, number of observations, representativeness of these observations.
• These conclusions are not definitely true, but they become very likely.
• Limitations that people have in inductive reasoning tasks?
• People rely on heuristics: mental shortcut, thinking aid.
• So then there is strong focus on some parts of the evidence (such as things that can be recalled to memory easily) and ignoring others.
• Ex. People being afraid of flying after 9/11, because they could recall easily a time when people died in a plane, but it was still safer
• Representativeness: They can look at someone and ask is he more likely to be a librarian or a farmer? But they are just making their decision on their looks… relying on similarity and neglecting other pertinent information. 
• Conjunction rule: conjunction of two events is never more likely to be the case than the single events alone.
• People are not usually capable of unbiased evidence, and look for evidence of what they agreed with in the first place.
• These are especially important for decision making.
• Have many options and chose from among those options. 
• 3 major approaches: normative, descriptive, prescriptive.
• Normative approach: trying to liken the decision making to some standard or norm, or evaluate it in realation to a norm. Asking, How should they decide?
• Descriptive: how do people make decisions?
• Prescriptive: how can we help people make decisions they way thay should? To improve their decision making. 
• Satisficing: just doing things well enough. Satisfies and suffices.
• A normative approach? => an expected utility. Takes into account the value of an option and the probability of an option.
• So, you have option x y and z
• V(x) P(x), V(y) P(y), P(z) V(Z)
• You calculate based on the value and proability of an option.
• In this model, you would do it perfectly, knowing how much you need or what you want, do the computation thoroughly and see what works best.
• Claims: losses pack more punch than gains.. it effects you more quickly with less.

Brad and Lisa's Presentations:

• Brad’s Presentation: Right or Wrong? The brain’s fast response to morally objectionable statements.
• (not a lot of studies have been done with moral issues)
• Two groups of dutch respondents with opposing value systems took a realistic attitude survey while EEG was recorded. Christian or not Christian parties
• Ex. I think euthanasia is an ACCEPTABLE vs. UNACCEPTABLE choice.
• They gave these word by word.
• Cognitive Survey research assumption: people read an entire statement then decide how they feel about it.
• Psycholinguistics: evidence indicates initial valuation happens rapidly as the statement unfolds.
• They think that affect effects the meaning of words… so we base it off of our emotional intuition.
• Haidt and Greene – moral decision making – intuitions and emotions.
• Ex. Why can’t you eat your dead dog?
• In this study, they were looking for three ERP components:
• Late Positivity Potential (LLP) Amplitude caries with ratings of emotional arousal.
• Negativity Bias (LPP) Negative stimuli generate stronger responses than positive
• N400 – larger amplitude = more difficult processing.
• Hypothesis: value inconsistent statements in both groups should elicit the same ERP effects for the opposite variants of the critical statements Elevated N400 as a result of value-inconsistent words being unexpected, emotionally salient, and attention grabbing. 
• Results: 
• Control condition did seem to work. The differences were the same between the Christians and non Christians , so they were disagreeing in the same brain areas, basically.
• N400 effect may come from expecting a different word, or it may index difficulites… like a mental pause. If it doesn’t mean what you think it should mean ahead of time, it takes extra time or resources to process it.
• Lpp effect: explained by negativity bias. Strongly disagreeable statements warrant extra attention. Lpp effect may have gotten interrupted by the N400?
• Conclusion: This task involved explicit evaluation : language was used in a natural way to communicate relevant ideas. The neural signature revealed here may or may not reflect the unlocking of deep moral values, its more superficial level. Findings were obtained with men only (SGP only allowed men to participate at the time).
• These findings testify to the presence of very rapid reciprocal links between neural systems for language and for valuation. 
• Relevant for the question, can prejudice be changed?

Lisa’s Presentation: How we know

• Explanation v. evidence
• Explanation seems to be more influential than evidence.
• People tend to offer explanations rather than covariation evidence when asked to justify theories.
• We depend on explanations that make our arguments make sense to us and feel we are “right”… We feel that we know when we think we know how it works (explanations). We are more interested in how it works than how if works… even though that’s backwards!
• Context is important
• Choosing explanations over evidence seems to depend on the context and the strength of the evidence
• This preference decreases developmentally
• This disappears with education.
• Dangers of Relying on Explanation
• Limits ability to analyze alternatives
• Leads to overconfidence
• Might be false
• Juries
• They have to make and justify a claim that is “correct”
• Jurors tend to rely on an explanation of “what happened” and come to a decision that is consistent with that explanation.
• Individual variation
• Satisficing: Hearing a narrative that is plausible, so you go with that.
• Theory-evidence coordination.: looking at all the alternatives and making a decision on what is the most consistent with evidence.

• The Social Dimension of Justification
• Many vs. one: can 6-12 people make a better decision than just one?
• Does deliberation with other jurors enhance the quality of the decision?
• Had individuals make a decision before they met, and had some make a decision after. Afterwards, they demonstrated a higher level of reasoning, and use evidence that they discussed in the group. They made the same decision, but used different reasons. McCoy, Nunez, Dammeyer
• Flanton: asked jurors before and after. 38% changed their decision following the  discussion, but they didn’t reason any better than they had before.
• Weinstock found that individual differences are stable across all different kinds of trials. Decisions cannot be changed by content differences of short term social interactions. 
• Age and Knowledge
• Hypothesis: below a certain age, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between evidence and explanation as a basis for knowledge claims.
• 4-6 yr olds were shown pictures, and they mixed evidence and explanation, they were the same for them.
• 4 yr olds gave more explanation-based responses.
• 6 yr olds still made a mistake of mixing the two, but were able to distinguish between evidence and explanation.
• As we get older, do we show an appreciation for the use of evidence?
• 8th graders, college students, and graduate students.
• Very few of the participants understood how to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each arguments (ex. Why do people smoke?)
• Nonepistemic: how right an argument is. 
• Epistemic: the form of the claim… sticking with this was hard.
• People immediately look at the specifics of the content.
• Absolutists, Multiplists, Evaluatisvist
• Absolutist
• Facts are objective, certain and come from and external reality
• Changes during adolescence and is replaces by multiplists
• Multiplist
• Aware of uncertain and understand how subjective knowing is
• (ex. Saying, well its just a matter of opinion… not necessarily one argument is better than the other).
• Evaluativist
• Knowing is objective
• 2 people can each have a legitimate argument
• Justification of claims becomes important
• Epistemological beliefs
• Can these beliefs explain indivdual differences in cognitive performance?
• Developmental data says yes
• Juror reasoning
• Hypothesis: Epistemological beliefs influence intellectual values which then influence if we engage in intellectual activities. These influence our intellectual performance.
• Ex, how important we think the act of learning is.
• Our understanding influences our values, which makes us choose whether or not to seek information.
• Real world reasoning
• Interpretation of any 2 cognitive variables is limited when two variables are similar
• Weinstock questioned jurors about a fictitious war
• One historian’s account had to be true
• People who believed this were more likely to believe that they had the only one right answer
• Each account was an informed interpretation 
• People who went with this one evaluated based on which had the best evidence.
• Epistemological understanding influences people’s justification of claims.
• Conclusion
• Differening conception of what it means to know something influences how people know. (can accept the facts if there are no alternatives, or accept valid claims to truth if there is a valid explanation, or we regard the claims as representations of the truth).
• Its important for people to know the strengths and weaknesses of an argument
• Individual differences such as a personality and cognition should be looks at to understand the role of disposition.
• Values and dispositions are acquired in social settings. 

Functional fixedness and problem solving

• Functional Fixedness article:
• How may human created things be represented differently in mind and brain than are other things?
• the design of something (links to the purpose or function). 
• Human created things we know what they are designed for. But we may not have that same type of info about natural things vs. a human artifact.
• based on the mechanical properties of the object.
• 6 years of age
• What do we mean by functional fixedness? We think of an object as having a particular function with exclusion to others. See it more in older children than younger. Younger children are less susceptible to fall into this rut.
• Why might we think that functional fixedness might be less in cultures with fewer complex technological devices?
• Fewer artifacts are used for more tasks, they are more accustomed to seeing a particular tool in many ways, such as a machete
• “Bricolage”: someone who works with their hands and uses devious means compared to those of the craftsman. Finding some sort of improvised solution when something breaks. Like a jack of all trades.
• When you don’t have a vast array of options, you may be more improvatory and have a greater ability to put tools to different uses… so maybe here there would be less evidence of functional fixedness. 
• So, how did they test the hypothesis that there would be less functional fixedness in a technologically sparse area?
• Studying hunter-horiculturalists of the Amazon region. Did an experiment comparing a function-demonstrated condition vs. a baseline condition.
• They would try and induce functional fixedness by having items IN a box or next to the box (so it is a container, not a building block). The spoon is in the cup as a scoop, or out of the cup. Sort of like the candle and matchbox condition. 
• Results: box condition: slower to select the box, but about equal time of solving the solution.
• In spoon condition, the function demonstration condition was slower both in selection and in total solving time.
• So it seems that these people are also prone to functional fixedness… but is it as great as it is in our own culture? We don’t know yet. 
• It seems that even these cultures are prone to seeing the objects as what they are used for, just like we are. So maybe seeing these attributes for humans is relatively universal, and not just a peculiarity in a certain culture. 
• So, the nature of concepts has implications for how we solve problems as well.

Wikibook: Problem solving

• Herbert simon characterized problem solving as a searching process. In what way is problem solving searching? What are you searching for/ among?
• You have to examine the various possible (mental) states, and then be able to find a path through intermediate states from the current state to the goal state. This is how it is searching… searching for a suitable path to the solution.
• Allen Newell and Herbert Simon – computer science ideas in cognitive psychology. This is the heart of their early contributions.
• What is the nature of this search?
• May be trial and error, or an organized search. What is the principle whereby you can proceed toward a solution in a systematic way?
• Means Ends Analysis: finding a way to analyze what means will lead to certain ends (the goal state). 
• Try to reduce the difference between initial state and goal state by creating sub-goals until a sub-goal can be reached directly. (Sub-goal is not the goal, but on the way to the goal… or a state on the way to the goal state). 
• These are domain general problem solving strategies…. Not specific to any domain, can be used when you have no idea or no advantages, just general problem solving strategies. Ex. Towers of Hanoi : moving disks from 1 peg to the other. 
• You can program a computer with an algorithm that will get you to your strategy no matter what for the towers of hanoi. – Herbert simon showed this.
• Once you become an expert on a certain problem (domain specific), then you may solve problems in a very different way. ex. chess
• Applications of analogies may be hard and people may disagree on them.
• In order to apply an anology, you have to notice similarities and apply point by point to make it work, and this is not easy kind of reasoning for people, so using analogies are not a fool-proof approach.
• Schemata: have a mental frame-work and you try and conceptualized based on those for some ideas… but also not fool-proof
• Experts vs. novice:  Experts know more about their field, their knowledge is organized differently, and they spend more time analyzing the problem. They think about the problem in a different way.
• Compared chess novices vs. experts, and Chess experts just rememeber a whole lot of Chess position. They have a huge repertoire of images of a chess board in their minds, and  they can act one those.
• Based on productions: if … then …. 
• This way, they can plug in chunks for knowledge, and can remember exactly what to do based on that image or knowledge of the situation. It becomes almost automatic after a while. 
• Herbert Simon article in moodle
• Physics problems: comparing how physics professors solve them against students. It seems that profs organize and classify the problems based on what basic principle the problem represents, and then can solve the problem much more easily. Novices rely on more superficial characteristics.
• To what extent are there general problem-solving strategies?? Hard to say. Maybe problem solving is actually quite domain specific. May not be a general characteristic… Problem solving.
• The expert examples may reflect domain specificity.

manic thoughts, bilingual, Stereotype threat

• manic people also have fast or racing though… is it the speed f our thoughts that make us happier?
• hypothesis: faster thoughts for them mean more elation and more positive mood, more powerful and creative despite if you think about sad things.
• They had four categories: happy/sad/fast/slow
• "mood induction” words/sentences showed up twice as fast vs. twice as slow, and then the participants rated how slow/fast they were thinking.
• Results: participants in fast thinking showed better moods than slow, and fast plus elation had the best moods.
• the strongest correlations between if you think you’re thinking fast and positive mood
• they had more manic thoughts/symptoms with faster thinking speeds
• even if you think depressing thoughts fast, you still are more positive.
• So, maybe it’s the speed of our thoughts that induces mania or depression
• if you had words going fast across a screen, perhaps you could induce a positive mood?

language cont. kids seem to make sign language more grammatical than adults.. kids are inherently grammatical!

Bilingual Article 

1. Does learning two languages simultaneously impede cognitive development?

-This has been a boiling issue for quite a few years. There was a period in which strong claims were made. But, there were findings beginning the 60s to indicate that that was not the case. In the end, we are coming to the fact that this is the case in some respects and not in others.

2. Are mind and brain in bilingual people different than those in people who speak one language?

-Probably yes – some general differences.

3. Metalinguistic awareness

-an awareness of language issues. Perhaps a difference is that bilingual people have more metalingustistic awareness? Maybe the answer is yes... it's not focused on in this article.

-In the end the authors argue that bilingual children that while they have more metalingustic awareness, thats not really the main advantage. They have a better ability to focus on grammar when sentences get confusing. They are able to ignore meaning and focus on grammar. There is an attentional advantage in selectivity and inhibition. This isn't really a language thing, but an attentional thing – components of executive functioning!

4. Executive Function and Bilingualism

-Children gradually master the ability to control attention, inhibit distraction, monitor sets of stimuli, expand working memory, and shift between tasks (executive function) that decline in older age.

*Task: Dimensional Change Card Sort Task: sort cards and some dimension is relevant (color or shape) and then you have to shift to a different dimensional.

-Results show that bilingual children do a better job of shifting dimensions.

*Task: Interpretation of an Ambiguous Feature

-Results show that bilingual children did a better job of shifting executive control processes.

5. Is this just in kids or in adults too?

-parallel results to the kids' study – with *Stroop Task and *flanker task (distraction task)

-greater ability to ignore distractors and shift views from one to another

*Simon Effect: you have compatible and incompatible responses compared

-Results show that differences between bilingual and monolingual individuals widen with age. There is a protective effect as people get older. (especially pronounced in older adults).

6. How do vocabularies differ for mono- and bi-lingual children?

-Bilingual children have smaller vocabularies.

7. Is there evidence for other deficits in bilingual children?

-lower scores of verbal fluency task, experience more tip-of-the-tongue states, and demonstrate more interference in lexical decision.

8. Is it helpful or is it not?

-Proactive Interferences: old learning gets in the way of new learning. Avoiding proactive interference is an executive control issue – can you take what you're attending to and separate it from you what attended to?

-When you're given lots of lists to remember, the interference gets worse and worse

-What about in bilinguals? It is less problematic for bilinguals. They are less affected by proactive interference.

9. Dementia

-Monolingual people acquire dementia 4 years earlier than monolingual persons.

-Implications for practical consequences.

• Cognitive processing in blilinuguals:
• people who are bilingual do better in tasks that involve shifting rules
• bilingualism helps protect against dementia
• it requires a high level of executive control and the tasks require you to inhibit one approach and enhance another
• it seems there is a constant control of the two, so perhaps the high executive control helps you to use this to your benefit in other areas of cognition

Wikibook: Problem solving From an Evolutionary perspective

• what is a problem?
• a situation that differs from the desired goal. Some problems we are naturally adapted to solve, but other more abstrac ones we may not encounter from day to day.
• not all species solve such abstract problems like humans do.
• well defined vs. ill defined problems:
• well defined has a finite set of rules, has a clearly defined state, and it has a clear goal state.
• ill defined: the problem can’t be properly formalized, and this may be the bulk of our everyday experiences.
• it involves creativity and defining the goal~
• Gestalt approach: tried to examine problem solving in a structured way. They want to know, how are you structuring things in the brain?
• Problem representations are models of the situation as experienced by the agent. Analyze it and split it into separate components.
• Wertheimer: restructuring – altering the way you process the info hoping that another way will be fruitful.
• Insight: productive thinking – suddenness component where all of the sudden you see the path to the solution.
• but sometimes a piece by piece step is more needed than one big ah-ha.
• sometimes we get stuck in a mental rut 
• ex. matches candles and tacks to corkboard (if they see the matches as a container, its hard for them to solve it).
• functional fixation is like a mental set we get stuck in.
• ex. water jar problem. 

Stereotype threat and financial decisions:

• decision making is shaped by emotion an intuition… an affect (heuristic) or deliberative processing 
• people tend to use more affect/intuition in decision making.
• Hypothesis: stereotype threat may effect decision making
• study 1 whether stereotype threat increases loss-aversion behavior in women.
• they were told in the stereotype threat condition that they would be measuring their ability
• coin toss lottery: indicate gender or not
• study 2 effect of risk aversiontasks varied in riskiness – risk aversion - # of trials they chose low-risk options.
• used a Stroop task to measure ego depletion
• ego depletion may be depletion of self control resources.
• Results: 
• women were more loss-averse than men in stereotype relevant conditions.
• stereotype threat increased risk aversion in women.
• in the stereotype condition, men were more willing to take risks.
• females showed more ego depletion in stereotype threat conditions.
• conclusion: we need to make sure stereotype threats are not present so people can make the best decision
• they are clear interaction effects in all 3 experiments. 

Ashley's Computational Models / Words as a window to thought: Object REpresentation

• we must specify all parts of the model to compare and falsify
• advantages: these models not have working memory limitation like our minds, and they can help to compute complex things
• a model supposedly reveals true or real behavior
• they ensure reproducibility in scientific thinking
• as new models are developed for more complex things, we need to try and find the simplest model that displays the data accurately
• Major reasons to uses these models:
• very repeatable
• it makes reasoning from different scientists consistent
• people may make mistakes in their reasoning, but this helps eliminate that... but they can be confusing. (con)

wikibook: worf: language changes our perception of reality

Object Representation:

• Comparing english to other languages, do these differences lead to different perceptions of objects?
• linguistic determinism? (grammatical differences)
• English has both count nouns (ex. a cat, two cats), and mass nouns (mud, not one mud or two mud)
• Madarian and japanese have only mass nouns
• So, does this change their perception of those objects?
• the authors say, maybe not.
• Words as windows - an alternative to whorf theory.
• words reveal the structure of thought, but don't modify it.
• so, neither is the complete determinate of the other. 
• Perhaps thoughts are not just represented in language, it can be represented separately from the words
• ex. I know what I want to say, but I can't find the words
• How should english speakers and Japanese speakers treat novel things (like the blicket test)?
• english speakers are more likely to treat novel things as objects (countable things) than just more "stuff"
• so, japanese children thought it was more of a substance
• But the authors argue that the japanese and english children have different information, there are 2 possibilities for English children and only one for japanese children
• count nouns are more common in english, so they are biased toward a count non, but that bias does not exist for the japanese children... so they are reasoning from different information.
• They found a way to make both of them (substance and shape) equally important, and under those conditions, things evened up between the two.
• Ratings experiment (whether they were more object like or more substance like) showed no difference either
• So, testing bilinguals: its not so much based in a different perception, but a different way of expressing.
• Can mass nouns ever be for countable individuals?
• mass nouns such as jewelry, furniture, etc. are mass nouns??? Or count nouns?? Should not refer to countable individuals just because they have no count syntax. 
• Quantity judgement task
• count noun: determined by number (ex. cups)
• mass nouns: determined by determined by volume (ex. ketchup)
• this implies that the syntax is not the issue thats at the core...
• weird nouns like string, or strings? does both mass and count... 
• but just because Japanese children don't have mass AND count nouns, doesn't mean they are perceiving things differently.

 Do english speakers rate likelihood to refer to object

-Results show no difference between english and japanese speakers.

-They are perceiving shape to the same degree. They are perceiving shape in a similar manner.

11. Do english and japanese speakers make different judgments?

-English and Japanese speakers are equally likely to perceive objects as substance. English speakers are often affected by syntax and Japanese speakers are about right in the middle (in the degree to which they judge something as a shape as opposed to just substance).

-Language doesn't seem to have much bearing on your judgments (as opposed to the Whorfian claim – this claim does not seem to be supported because of it's degree).

12. Development – From a Whorfian perspective one might argue that learning syntax is a crucial thing that shapes your understanding which would make you think that maybe the learning of your syntax of language comes first and then your understanding of the world falls into place to fall in line with this syntax. So, do children learn meaning (semantics) first or syntax first?

-Manual Search Task: child watched the exp. Put balls in the box, then the child is allowed to remove a ball. At the end, if the exp. Removes balls – to what extent does the child notice that and continue to search?

-For 12 month olds: if you have three balls only, then they keep searching for the missing balls that the exp. Took. If you have four or more balls – they don't do it anymore. There is some fundamental break between three and four years old.

-For 22 month olds: they begin to search for the ball – about the same age when they begin producing plural nouns. In fact, infants were more likely to distinguish singular and plural sets if they produced plural nouns in their speech. The language milestone and performance milestone are come to at the same time.

-Since count nouns have this syntactical feature – that their ability to do this would be driven by language. (Fits with Whorfian claim). This also applies to other children – both in japanese and mandarin languages. The syntactical features is not a crucial factor driving understanding of the world.

13. Claims

-This is not a claim that language has no influence on thoughts. Our perception of reality seems to be more driven by reality rather than by language. (Thank goodness...)