Language & Cognition Knowledge Organizer

Here’s a knowledge organizer I’ve created of the most essential concepts for language & cognition in an introductory psychology course. These knowledge organizers are designed to help you identify the most important factual knowledge you need to have in order to engage in the more challenging activities of discussing, writing about, and applying the concepts. If you find these useful … Read More

Benefits of Heuristics

In this video I end the unit on cognition with the reminder that heuristics are not just about making errors in decision-making. Most of the time heuristics work well and they serve as useful tools for making sense of the world and being able to make decisions with limited information. In some cases they can even make less information more … Read More

The Framing Effect

In this video I introduce Tversky and Kahneman’s work on the framing effect and how consideration of benefits or losses can influence the choices that people make and their willingness to take risks. I consider a few everyday examples of this, then consider how the framing of default options may also influences the choices we make, as demonstrated in Eric … Read More

The Representativeness Heuristic

In this video I describe another heuristic identified by the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. The representativeness heuristic is a shortcut that we use when attempting to estimate the odds of something being true, such as whether an interview profile came from a lawyer or an engineer. Rather than using relevant base rate information, participants showed a tendency … Read More

The Availability Heuristic

In this video I provide an introduction to behavioral economics and the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman by describing a heuristic we use when attempting to assess the frequency of events. The availability heuristic is a shortcut that estimates frequency based on how available an event is to us, or how readily we can bring examples to mind. … Read More

Obstacles to Problem Solving

In this video I introduce several potential obstacles to problem-solving including overconfidence, illusory superiority, belief bias, and belief perseverance. Then I describe a “consider the opposite” strategy for potentially reducing the influence of bias when interpreting evidence that supports or contradicts our pre-existing beliefs. Don’t forget to subscribe to the channel to see future videos! Have questions or topics you’d … Read More

Problem Solving

In this video I introduce several concepts related to problem-solving. I begin with mental set, which refers to our tendency to rely on approaches that have worked in the past. Similarly, functional fixedness refers to our tendency to think of tools as having single fixed uses and this may cause us to overlook novel uses for them. Convergent thinking refers … Read More

Category Recognition

In this video I consider how language can help us to organize thought and create more precise concepts and categories. This raises the question of how we recognize new stimuli as being part of a particular category. Protoype theory suggests that we mentally compare new stimuli to a prototype or most-typical example for a particular category. Exemplar theory suggests that … Read More

How Does Language Influence Thought?

In this video I consider the relationship between language and thought. The Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, or linguistic relativity hypothesis, suggests that one’s language influences one’s perception of the world. While evidence is mixed on just how language influences thought, there are other ways of examining the complex relationship between language, thought, and culture. It’s possible to consider how language influences thought … Read More