PSYC 307 - Cognition and Perception

Holistic thinking involves (4)

- An orientation to the entire scene - Attending to the relations among objects - Predicting an object's behaviour on a basis of thsoe relationships - Relies on associative thought

Where did these attribution reasonings originate from?

- Classical Greek and Confucians Chinese thought - Acceptance for contradiction vs Aristotle's Laws

Analytic thinking involves (4)

- Separating objects from each other - Breaking down objects to their component parts - Using rules to explain and predict an object's behaviour - Relies on abstract thought

Which is more common, absolute or egocentric space representation?

Absolute is common in most subsistence societies around the world. Even for bilingual people who can use bother, prefer absolute way Chimps don't use egocentric Egocentric is a recent development

Which researcher provided a lot of evidence for holistic and analytic thinking

Richard Nisbett

Study - contradictory acceptance with two arguments (one logical and one contradictory), shown one argument or both

Americans who were shown both arguments showed counternormative reasoning in which they were even more convinced that the strong argument was correct compared to just hearing the strong argument Chinese saw the strong argument as less plausible than if they heard a contradictory argument. However, they also showed a counternormative response in which they saw the weak argument being more plausible if it was paired with a contradictory argument

Two basic systems for reasoning

Analytic and holistic thinking

Numerical cogntiion in the absence of words

Anything after 3 is learned Culture that does not have a word beyond "two", only accurate to numbers up to 3 or 4, but had a general understanding of magnitude Recent studies have shown that tribes without number words think in magnitude - logarithmically

Classical Greek and Confucian Chinese though

Aristotle: world consists of discrete, unchanging objects operating by universal laws Confucius: harmony, interconnectedness, and change *Recent research has found that holistic thinking exists everywhere outside the Western world

How do independent cultures think of others?

As being fundamentally independent from each other, and composed of their component parts. The physical world can be thought of in the same way

How do interdepedent cultures think of others?

Attend to the relations among people. Generalized to an attention of relations among objects in one's environment

Tolerance for contradiction

Chinese show a relative acceptance for contradiction - termed "naive dialectism" Based on the view that everything is connected and constantly in flux (Yin/Yang) "Belief A" is always changing to its opposite, "Belief Not A", so no logical contradiction Artistotle had 3 principles, where according to this perspective, there cannot be any contradiction (you must be looking at it wrong)

Study - thinking out loud with Raven's Matrices. What was the dependent variable?

Did 10 Q's silent, then did 10 Q's while thinking out loud. Dependent variable was how many IQ questions they answered correctly while thinking out loud or saying the alphabet compared to silent questions. Euro: relatively unaffected whether thinking out loud or silent. But performed worse when saying alphabet Asians: perform worse when thinking out loud, but unaffected when saying alphabet Suggests that Asian's thoughts are non-verbal, where Euro's are thinking verbally about the task even when silent

Explaining how people's behaviours by attending to their personal characteristics is

Dispositional Attribution

How are attitudes toward contradiction evident towards the self

East Asians more likely to offer apparently contradictory self-description: "I'm both shy and outgoing"

Study - impoverished odor lexicon

English has few words for smell, in contrast to Jahal of Malaysia When given series of colors and odors to identify, Americans reach much more agreement among each other for color but not for smell. Jahal is around thes ame for both

Talking and thinking (inner monologue) with analytic and holistic thinking

Holistic thinking should be impaired more by saying one's thought out loud because there are multiple connections that are simultaneously relevent *Talking out loud is an analytic process because one one idea can be said at one time

Novelty and Usefulness with culture

Individualism promotes novelty Collectivism promotes useful ideas When Koreans and Dutch were motivated to do well, Dutch came up with more original ideas and Koreans came up with more useful ideas

Whorfian hypothesis (strong hypothesis)

Language determines thought - largely rejected

Weaker version of Whorfian hypothesis

Language influences thought

Aristotle's 3 principles

Law of Identity: A=A Law of Excluded Middle: A=B or A=not B Law of Noncontradiction: A=not A

Innate way of number thinking

Logarithmically, participants placed the middle of 1-10 at about a 3 rather than a 5 Young children also show logarithmic thinking - suggests that linear thinking might be culturally learned

Cultural difference in webpages

NA webpages have fewer links and words than East Asian ones, since East Asians can attend to busier scenes

Value of spoken word in Westerners and East Asians

NA: freedom of speech, knowledge to emerge through spoken word. Westerners value spoken word more Asia: "He who knows does not speak, he who speak does not know", emphasize meditation and prayer

How has creativity been operationalized?

Need to be both 1) Novel and 2) Useful and appropriate, so need to consider these 2 separately

Study - directional terms Dutch (english) and Guugu Ymithirr (cardinal terms NESW)

Shown objects, then asked to rearrange in the different room where they were facing the other way (South instead of North). GY people set it the opposite way compared to Dutch

Study - Blue green stimuli

Shown triad of colors - one the middle and the other two were equidistant in hue. Asked to say which color matched the middle one People make judgements based on whether the color of the chips crossed boundaries of the color terms in their own language than in other languages

Attribution tendencies with age for NA and Indians

Similar results at age 8 As Americans got older they made more dipositional attributions, but not situational ones - show fundamental attribution error As Indians got older,they made more situational attributions, but not dispositional ones - show reverse fundamental attribution error

Explaining how people's behaviours by attending to their contextual variables is

Situational Attribution

Facial recognition and thinking out loud

Studies find that when people verbally describe a face it impairs their recognition of the face (since a face is holistic - interferes with our verbalization)

Fundamental Attribution Error

Tendency for people to place an undue emphasis on internal characteristics (personality) to explain someone else's behavior in a given situation rather than considering the situation's external variables

Are Western or Eastern people more likely to develop mental illness?

Western

Cultural differences in people's predictions about the future

Westerners view the future as linear, where Asians see it as more cyclical, where good times might be followed by bad times

Study - Field independence/dependence in backgrounds and wolf in picture

When backgrounds scenes are switched, East Asians perform worse - see the scene as more bound together

Languages and gender of objects

When learning to associate names with objects, Spanish and German (both use M/F for objects) find it easier to remember the names that fit the gender of their objects