Psychology an exploration canadian 1st edition ciccarelli solutions manual

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6/ CONSCIOUSNESS AND COGNITION TABLE OF CONTENTS LECTURE GUIDE      

What Is Consciousness? (p. 357) Altered States: Sleep (p. 357) How People Think (p. 359) Language (p. 360) Applying Psychology to Everyday Life: The cognitive benefits of multilingualism (p. 361) Chapter Summary (p. 361)

FULL CHAPTER RESOURCES      

Learning Objectives (p. 362) Rapid Review (p. 363) Lecture Launchers and Discussion Topics (p. 365) Classroom Activities, Demonstrations, and Exercises (p. 379) Handouts (p. 391) Web Resources (p. 402)

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LECTURE GUIDE WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS? (TEXT P. 202) Lecture Launchers/Discussions Topics:  The Bubble, the Butterfly, the Fighter  What Is It Like to Be a Bat?  Subjective Descriptions of States of Consciousness  The Disadvantages of Shift Work  Reflecting on Self-Awareness Classroom Activities, Demonstrations, and Exercises:  Exploring the Stream of Consciousness  Working Shifts Web Resource:  Consciousness

6.1 What does it mean to be conscious, and are there different levels of consciousness? (text p. 202) • Definition of Consciousness  Consciousness is a person’s awareness of everything that is going on at any given moment. Most waking hours are spent in waking consciousness.

• Altered States of Consciousness  Altered states of consciousness are shifts in the quality or pattern of mental activity.

ALTERED STATES: SLEEP (TEXT P. 203) Lecture Launchers/Discussions Topics:  How to Get a Good Night’s Sleep  Sleeping Too Much?  Sleep Disorders and Treatment  Sleep and School Times  The Uberman Sleep Schedule  Drowsy Driving  The Bitter Tatse of Drugged Sleep Classroom Activities, Demonstrations, and Exercises:  Working Shifts  Losing the Alarm Clock  Sleep Needs  Circadian Rhythms Web Resources:  Sleep  Body Rhythms

6.2 Why do people need to sleep, and how does sleep work? (text p. 203) • The Necessity of Sleep  Sleep is a circadian rhythm, lasting 24 hours • Most adults require seven to nine hours of sleep per 24-hour period.

6.3 What are the different stages of sleep, including the stage of dreaming and its importance? (text p. 205) • The Stages of Sleep  Non-REM Stage 1 sleep is light sleep.

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Non-REM Stage 2 sleep is indicated by the presence of sleep spindles--bursts of activity on the EEG.  Non-REM Stage 3 and is highlighted by the first appearance of delta waves, the slowest and largest waves.  Once delta waves account for more than 50% of total brain activity, the person is in Stage 4 sleep and the body is at its lowest level of functioning. Eventually delta waves become the predominant brain activity.

What happens in REM Sleep  After spending time in Stage Four, the person will go back up through Stage Three and Stage Two, and then enter a stage in which body temperature increases, the heart beats faster, the eyes move rapidly under the eyelids, and brain waves resemble beta waves—REM sleep.  90 percent of dreams occur in REM sleep.  REM sleep occurs four or five times a night, replacing Stage One sleep in the sleep-wake cycle, and is accompanied by paralysis of the voluntary muscles.  REM behaviour disorder is a rare condition in which REM paralysis fails and the person moves violently while dreaming, often acting out the elements of the dream.

The Need for REM Sleep  REM sleep serves a different purpose than NREM (non-REM) sleep.  After a physically demanding day—NREM sleep.  After an emotionally stressful day—REM sleep—suggests that REM sleep is a way of dealing with anxiety.  Early studies of REM sleep seemed to show that a lack of REM sleep would lead to madness, but later research has consistently shown this to be untrue.  REM sleep in early infancy differs from adult REM sleep.  Infants are not dreaming but rather forming new connections between neurons.

6.4 How do sleep disorders interfere with normal sleep? (text p. 208) • Sleep Disorders  Nightmares are bad or unpleasant dreams that occur during REM sleep.  Sleepwalking, or somnambulism, is more common in childhood and seems to be at least partially hereditary.  Night terrors are rare, but most likely in children. It is essentially a state of panic experienced while sleeping.  Psychology in the News: Murder While Sleepwalking • There have been instances in which sleepwalking was used as a murder defense, with mixed results.  Insomnia is an inability to get to sleep, stay asleep, or get enough sleep.

• Ways to combat insomnia include going to bed only when sleepy, not doing anything in your bed but sleeping, not trying too hard to sleep, keeping a regular schedule, and not using drugs or alcohol that slow the nervous system.  Sleep apnea occurs when a person stops breathing for nearly half a minute or more, followed by gasping for breath.  Narcolepsy is a genetic disorder in which the person suddenly and without warning collapses into REM sleep.

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HOW PEOPLE THINK (TEXT P. 212) Lecture Launchers/Discussions Topics:  Types of Problems  Intuition  Don’t Believe Everything You Read…Except This  Are We Good at Making Decisions?  Functional Fixedness Classroom Activities, Demonstrations, and Exercises:  Learning a Concept  Mental Imagery  Problem Representation  Insight  Availability Heuristics  Breaking Sets in Problem-Solving  Demonstrating Cognitive Biases  Creative Thinking  Mental Sets in Everyday Life  Creativity Quiz Web Resources:  Problem-Solving

6.5 How are mental images and concepts involved in the process of thinking? (text p. 212) • Mental Imagery  Mental images represent objects or events and have a picture-like quality • Concepts  Concepts are ideas the represent a class or category of events, objects, or activities.  Prototypes are examples of concepts that more closely match the defining characteristics of that concept.

6.6 What are the methods people use to solve problems and make decisions? (text p. 216) • Problem Solving and Decision Making  Problem solving consists of thinking and behaving in certain ways to reach a goal.  Mechanical solutions include trial-and-error learning and rote solutions.  Algorithms are a type of rote solution in which one follows step-by-step procedures for solving certain types of problems.  A heuristic, or “rule-of-thumb,” is a strategy that narrows down the possible solutions for a problem.

• A representative heuristic is used for categorizing objects.

• The availability heuristic is an estimate of frequency based on how easily relevant information can be recalled from memory.

• In means-end analysis, the difference between the current situation and the goal is determined, then reduced by applying various methods or means.  Insight is the sudden perception of a solution to a problem 6.7 Why does problem solving sometimes fail, and what is meant by creative thinking? (text p. 218) • Problems with Problem Solving  Functional fixedness is the tendency to perceive objects as having only the use for which they were originally intended, therefore failing to see them as possible tools for solving other problems.

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Mental sets is the tendency to persist in the use of problem-solving patterns that have worked in the past, leaving people hesitant to think of other possibilities.  Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for evidence that confirms one’s beliefs, ignoring any evidence to the contrary.

Creativity  In convergent thinking, a problem is seen as having only one answer and all lines of thinking will eventually converge on that single answer by using previous knowledge and logic.  Divergent thinking involves coming up with as many different answers as possible. This is a kind of creativity (combining ideas or behaviour in new ways).  Creative people are usually good at mental imagery and have knowledge on a wide range of topics, are unafraid to be different, value their independence, and are often unconventional in their work but not other areas.

LANGUAGE (TEXT P. 222) Lecture Launchers/Discussions Topics:  The Influence of Language on Thought  Eye-Tongue Coordination  Nonverbal Gestures  Who Talk More: Men or Women?  The Genetics of Language Classroom Activities, Demonstrations, and Exercises:  Context and Speech Perception  Non-sexist Language  Channels of Communication  Do Animals Have Language? A Survey  Exploring Bilingualism  Is Reading Automatic? A Survey Web Resources:  Language

6.8 How is language defined, and what are its different elements and structure? (text p. 222)  Language is a system for combining symbols so that an infinite number of meaningful statements can be created and communicated to others.

• The Levels of Language Analysis • Grammar is the system of rules by which language is governed.

• Syntax: system of rules that govern how a sentence is to be put together grammatically correct.

• Morphemes: smallest units of meaning within a language.

• Phonemes: basic unit of sound.

• Pragmatics refer to practical aspects of language.

6.9 Does language influence the way people think, and are animals capable of learning language? (text p. 224) • The Relationship Between Language and Thought  Sapir and Whorf originally proposed that language controls and helps the development of thought processes and concepts, an idea that is known as the linguistic relativity hypothesis.

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Other researchers have found evidence that concepts are universal and directly influence the development of language, called the cognitive universalism viewpoint.

Studies with chimpanzees, parrots, and dolphins have been somewhat successful in demonstrating that animals can develop a basic kind of language, including some abstract ideas.

Controversy exists over the lack of evidence that animals can learn syntax, which some feel means that animals are not truly learning and using language. Studies with chimpanzees, parrots, and dolphins have been somewhat successful in demonstrating that animals can develop a basic kind of language, including some abstract ideas.

APPLYING PSYCHOLOGY TO EVERYDAY LIFE: THE COGNITIVE BENEFITS OF MULTILINGUALISM (TEXT P. 227)

6.10 Is learning more than one language beneficial? (text p. 227)  Canada is different from many other countries as it has two official languages: French and English.  58% refer to English as their first speaking language; 22% refer to French as their first speaking language; and remaining 20% refer to another language as their first speaking language.  Bilingualism leads to many cognitive advantages in children, young adults, and older adults; in children it was found that they have advanced ability in solving problems in which there is misleading perceptual information, and in older adults, it was found that they maintain a higher level of cognitive control over the age of 60.

CHAPTER SUMMARY (TEXT P. 227) Classroom Activities, Demonstrations, and Exercises:  Crossword Puzzle Chapter 6  Fill-in-the-Blank Exercise Chapter 6

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CHAPTER 6 Learning Objectives 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8 6.9 6.10

What does it mean to be conscious, and are there different levels of consciousness?

Why do people need to sleep, and how does sleep work?

What are the different stages of sleep, including the stage of dreaming and its importance?

How do sleep disorders interfere with normal sleep?

How are mental images and concepts involved in the process of thinking?

What are the methods people use to solve problems and make decisions?

Why does problem solving sometimes fail, and what is meant by creative thinking?

How is language defined, and what are its different elements and structure?

Does language influence the way people think, and are animals capable of learning language?

Is learning more than one language beneficial?

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CHAPTER 6 Rapid Review (From Ciccarelli/White Psychology: An Exploration Study Guide and Concept Notes by Natalie Ceballos ISBN 0205260551)

Consciousness is defined as a person’s awareness of the world around him or her; this information is used to organize behaviour. Waking consciousness is defined as the state of awareness where our thoughts and feelings are clear and organized. An altered state of consciousness describes a shift in the quality or pattern of a person’s awareness. Examples of altered states of consciousness include using drugs, daydreaming, being hypnotized, or simply sleeping.

The sleep-wake cycle is a circadian rhythm, meaning one cycle takes about a day to complete.

Based on brain wave activity recorded with the use of an EEG, sleep has been divided into two different types, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and non-REM (NREM) sleep. Non-REM sleep is a deep, restful sleep and consists of four stages. Stage 1 sleep is also called light sleep and occurs when brain activity begins to shift from alpha to theta wave activity. Many people experience a hypnic jerk in this stage when their body jerks suddenly and wakes them up. As body temperature continues to drop and heart rate slows, sleep spindles begin to appear on the EEG recording, signalling Stage 2 of non-REM sleep. Stage 3 occurs when the slow, large delta waves first appear; and when delta waves account for more than 50 percent of the total brain activity, the person is said to be in Stage 4, the deepest stage of sleep.

After a person cycles through Stages 1-4 and back, instead of entering Stage 1, people experience REM sleep. During this type of sleep, the brain is active and displays beta wave activity (also seen when people are wide awake and mentally active), the eye exhibits rapid movements, and the skeletal muscles of the body are temporarily paralyzed. This paralysis is referred to as REM paralysis. When a person is wakened from this type of sleep they often report being in a dream state. Most likely, around 90 percent of dreams take place in REM sleep, although dreams also do occur in non-REM sleep.

Contrary to popular belief, people do not go crazy when deprived of REM sleep; however, they do spend longer amounts of time in REM sleep when allowed to sleep normally again. This phenomenon is known as REM rebound. Nightmares are bad dreams and typically occur in REM sleep. REM behaviour disorder is a rare disorder in which a person’s muscles are not paralyzed during REM sleep, allowing them to thrash about and even get up and act out their dreams.

There are a large number of disorders associated with sleep. Sleepwalking, or somnambulism, occurs in Stage 4, as well as the rare disorder of night terrors. Most people state that they are not aware of the actions they committed during a sleepwalking episode. The explanation of “sleepwalking” has been used as a successful defense in several trials for murder, but in these cases, the term sleepwalking is more likely referring to the condition known as REM behaviour disorder. Insomnia is the inability to get to sleep, stay asleep, or get a good night of quality sleep. Sleep apnea is a disorder in which a person actually stops breathing for brief periods throughout the night. Narcolepsy is a genetic disorder in which a person suddenly enters REM sleep during the day. The attack can occur many times throughout the day and without warning. The attacks often occur with cataplexy, or a sudden loss of muscle tone.

Thinking, or cognition, can be defined as mental activity that goes on in the brain when a person is processing information. Cognition includes both verbal and nonverbal processes. Two examples of cognition are mental images, which are picture-like representations that stand in for objects or events, and concepts, or ideas that represent a class of objects. Concepts can be ranked from general to specific by applying the terms superordinate, basic level type, and subordinate. Formal concepts are defined by specific rules, while natural concepts are formed as a result of experience. A prototype is a specific example of a concept that closely resembles the defining features of a concept. Concepts are formed through experience and culture and have an impact on our thinking.

Problem solving involves using our thoughts or cognitions to reach a goal and consists of at least four different techniques. Trial-and-error (mechanical solution) problem solving refers to trying one solution after another until finding one that works. When someone uses algorithms to problem-solve they Copyright © 2016 Pearson Canada Inc. 283

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are following step-by-step procedures to solve the problem. Heuristics are general “rules of thumb” that can be applied to many situations. For instance, representative heuristics are assumptions that any object (or person) sharing characteristics with the members of a particular category is also a member of that category. Availability heuristics involve estimating the frequency or likelihood of an event based on how easy it is to recall relevant information from memory or how easy it is for us to think of related examples.

Means-end analysis is an example of one type of heuristic where the difference between where you are and where you want to be is determined and then steps are taken to reduce that difference. Insight consists of solving the problem by having a sudden moment of inspiration or “aha!” moment.

Some factors that interfere with problem solving include functional fixedness, which is when a person thinks about objects only in terms of their typical uses; mental sets which are tendencies to use the same problem-solving strategies that worked in the past; and confirmation bias, which consists of the search for evidence that fits your beliefs while ignoring any contradictory information. Creativity occurs when a person solves a problem by combining ideas and behaviours in a new way. Many methods of problem solving utilize convergent thinking, which assumes that one single answer exists for the problem. Divergent thinking is the opposite process of convergent thinking. When an individual uses divergent thinking, he or she starts from one point and comes up with many possibilities or ideas based on that point.

Language is defined as a system for combining symbols (such as words) so that an unlimited number of meaningful statements can be made for the purpose of communicating with others and can be analyzed at many levels. Semantics is the rules for determining the meaning of words and sentences. Phonemes are the most basic units of sounds used in a specific language, morphemes combine the units of sound into the smallest units that have meaning, grammar includes all the rules for combining morphemes into words, and syntax is the rules for combining words into sentences. Pragmatics deals with the practical aspects of communicating with others. The relationship between language and thought has been studied extensively. The linguistic relativity hypothesis, proposes that the words people use determine how they think about themselves and the world. An opposing theory, known as cognitive universalism, proposes that certain ways of thinking are shared among all groups of people and influence the development of language in similar ways. Animals other than humans demonstrate a diverse ability to communicate but it is unclear whether or not they have the capability for language as demonstrated by the ability to use abstract symbols to communicate. Kanzi, a bonobo chimpanzee, has demonstrated an ability to understand about 150 spoken English words. However, none of the animals studied to date appear to have been able to use and comprehend syntax.

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LECTURE LAUNCHERS AND DISCUSSION TOPICS The Bubble, the Butterfly, the Fighter What Is It Like to Be a Bat? Subjective Descriptions of States of Consciousness The Disadvantages of Shift Work Reflecting on Self-Awareness How To Get a Good Night’s Sleep Sleeping Too Much?

Sleep Disorders and Treatment Sleep and School Times The Uberman Sleep Schedule Drowsy Driving The Bitter Taste of Drugged Sleep Types of Problems Intuition Don’t Believe Everything You Read…Except This Are We Good At Making Decisions?

Functional Fixedness The Influence of Language on Thought Eye-Tongue Coordination Nonverbal Gestures Who Talks More: Men or Women?

The Genetics of Language How to Improve Cognitive Processes Lecture Launcher: The Bubble, the Butterfly, the Fighter The name Jean-Dominique Bauby may never enter the annals of psychology; it may not even be recognized by most Americans. But Bauby’s last work sheds light on the nature of consciousness and what it means to be human.

Bauby was the former editor-in-chief of Elle magazine. A noted French journalist, the 45-year-old led a fast-paced life filled with glamour and travel, until December 8, 1995. A massive stroke felled Bauby and left him in a lockedin coma. Locked-in syndrome is characterized by a virtually complete paralysis, although the brain (and the mind) are left largely unaffected. The condition is like being “a mind in a jar” to use Bauby’s own words.

But what words? Unable to move, unable to speak, and dependent on machines for all of his bodily functions, Bauby’s prognosis was grim. He found, however, that the muscle of his left eyelid was still under his control, and through a series of blinks and twitches Bauby was able to communicate his mental alertness to his caregivers. In fact, his nurses would recite a specially-sequenced alphabet, to which Bauby would blink on certain letters. In this fashion he was able to craft words, sentences, and entire discussions with his doctors and letters to his friends.

One such letter, to French editor Robert Laffont, prompted an offer to compose a book about his condition. Through the tedious process of “blinking dictation,” Bauby wrote, letter by letter, Le Scaphrande et le Papillon (The Bubble and the Butterfly), a 137-page account of his locked-in state. In it he recounts the daily tedium of physical therapy sessions, of being unable to swallow the sea of saliva that permanently wells in his mouth, or to shoo the flies that walk brazenly across his face. Deeper reflections reveal the anger and frustration of being imprisoned in a shell of a body, unable to hold his son or talk to his loved ones. Through it all, however, Bauby retained his joie de vivre. He founded an association for other victims of locked-in syndrome, appeared on a French television special about his condition, and proposed several other blinking/writing projects.

Unfortunately Bauby was unable to see these projects to completion. Within 72 hours of his book’s publication he died. The light that he shed on this fascinating and macabre syndrome, however, illuminates an indomitable spirit.

Bauby’s story is told in the 2007 French film “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” directed by Julian Schnabel.

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Instructor’s Resource Manual for Psychology: An Exploration Crumley, B. (March 24, 1997). A triumph of the spirit. Time, 90.

Cummings, J. L., Greenberg, R. (1977). Sleep patterns in the locked-in syndrome. Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 43(2), 270-271.

Frank, C., Harrer, G., Ladurner, G. (1988). Locked in syndrome: Dynamics of experience and extended communication. Nervenarzt, 59(6), 337-343. [German] Kirkpatrick, G. A. (1987). In re Rodas. Issues in Law and Medicine, 2(6), 471-480.

Markand, O. N. (1976). Electroencephalogram in locked in syndrome. Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 40(5), 529-534.

Lecture/Discussion: What Is It Like to Be a Bat? In a paper on the nature of consciousness, the philosopher Thomas Nagel posed the now famous question, “What is it like to be a bat?” Bats, of course, primarily use sonar to sense the world around them at night. This means that any conscious awareness the bat might have is based on an entirely different set of sensory and perceptual systems than we use. Nagel argues that it is impossible for a human to ever know what it is like to be a bat because consciousness is subjective. In other words, an expert on bats may know a tremendous amount about how bats use sonar, but according to Nagel, they can never know what the experience of using sonar is like. Other philosophers and psychologists have disagreed with Nagel. They argue that a careful study of a bat’s brain and sonar system would make it possible to discover what the experience of a bat is like.

Introduce Nagel’s famous thought experiment to the class and encourage students to share their opinions. You may want to use the following scenario in your discussion: Suppose a race of super-intelligent robots from another planet visited Earth. Using advanced scanning technology, they are able to determine exactly how your brain works, down to the function of each individual neuron. Armed with this knowledge, would the robots know what it is like to be you?

Conclude the discussion by having students respond to the following writing prompt: Writing Prompt: How is consciousness defined for the purposes of this class? What is an “altered state of consciousness?” Provide several examples.

Sample answer: We defined consciousness as a person’s awareness of the world around them and of their own internal thoughts and feelings. In an altered state of consciousness, our awareness is somehow different than when we are in our normal awake state. For example, when we are asleep our experience of events around us, and even the passage of time, are very different than when we are awake. Likewise, taking any number of psychoactive drugs can cause an altered state of consciousness, during which our perceptions, thoughts, and feelings can be severely affected.

Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? The Philosophical Review, 83, 435–450.

Lecture/Discussion: Subjective Descriptions of States of Consciousness Objective: To illustrate the difficulties involved in defining consciousness Materials: None Procedure: This activity can either be in a verbal form for a small class or in a written form for larger sections. Ask students to describe what they “feel” when they daydream; when they drift off to sleep; or when they consume mind-altering substances, such as alcohol. If any students have been hypnotized, have them describe the experience.

Lecture/Discussion: The disadvantages of shift work There are several studies that have documented the detrimental health effects of shift work. One study conducted by Gordon et al. (1986) found that males who work variable work schedules had higher rates of heavy drinking, job stress, and emotional problems than did males working set schedules. Females who worked variable shifts reported more use of sleeping pills, tranquilizers, and alcohol as well as more job stress and emotional problems. One Copyright © 2016 Pearson Canada Inc. 286

Chapter 6: Consciousness and Cognition interesting finding was that no difference was found in heavy cigarette smoking or coffee drinking between straight-shift workers and variable-shift workers. The authors suggest that more attention should be placed on health promotion at variable shift worksites.

Many students also tend to work shifts. You might ask your students how difficult it is to maintain sleep schedules that are conducive to them being a good employee as well as a good worker.

Gordon, N. P., Cleary, P. D., Parker, C. E., & Czeisler, C. A. (1986). The prevalence and health impact of shiftwork. American Journal of Public Health, 76, 1225–1228.

Lecture/Discussion: Reflecting on Self-Awareness A basic question of consciousness focuses on how we come to know ourselves. Advocates of mind-altering substances or devotees of certain mystic rites point to the “expanded consciousness” and greater awareness of ourselves that can be attained, and almost everyone embraces the admonition to “know thyself.”

The framework suggested by these examples, however, recruits a rather select group of self-knowers: sentient, rational adults with long prior experience (from any number of sources) of acquiring self-knowledge. An investigation of the origins and limits of self-knowledge, however, might entail both phylogenetic and ontogenetic approaches. For example, how much self-recognition does an infant have? Certainly a preverbal child cannot describe his or her experience of the self, and if the child could, its vocabulary would probably be inadequate to capture the richness of the self-recognition experience. (Imagine your two-year-old reporting that she “apprehended the self-as-known in a moment of lucid insight.”) To press the point further, to what extent are members of other species self-aware? We can repeatedly ask the two-year-old child what he or she is experiencing until, with time, a vocabulary capable of describing the experiences is developed. We cannot, however, expect our cat to relate the “reflective experience of comparing the present self to the ideal self,” no matter how much we ask it.

Several researchers have been interested in questions of self-recognition, self-awareness, and self-knowledge in other species, and have actively sought ways to gather evidence for these processes. As an example, Gordon G. Gallup, Jr., developed a technique for testing self-recognition among primates that circumvented the barrier produced by lack of a common communication system between species. One marker of self-recognition is the ability to visually identify oneself, such as occurs when looking in a mirror. Gallup capitalized on this facet of recognition in a study using chimpanzees. The chimps were given several days of exposure to a mirror in their environment. Gallup noted that at first the chimpanzees acted as though the image in the mirror was another animal. Gradually, however, they began to respond in a way that suggested they had realized they were seeing an image of themselves. To validate these observations, Gallup anaesthetized the chimpanzees and applied an odourless, bright red dye to their faces, in such a location that it could only be seen in the mirror. When the chimpanzees were revived and the mirrors were reintroduced, all the chimpanzees reacted in a way that strongly suggested mirror self-recognition. The chimps reached up to their faces, exploring the marks, while watching their reflections, and did so more often than under control conditions.

This procedure, subsequently dubbed the “mark test,” has been used with a number of other species. Gallup contends, however, that although chimpanzees and orangutans can reliably demonstrate self-recognition of this type, the effect has not been reliably demonstrated among gorillas, monkeys, or prosimians. Recently, work has begun testing the phenomenon among bottlenose dolphins. An article in Scientific American outlines some of this more recent research: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=dolphin-self-recognition.

Gallup, G. G., Jr. (1970). Chimpanzees: Self-recognition. Science, 167, 341-343.

Parker, S. T., Mitchell, R. W., & Boccia, M. L. (Eds.) (1994). Self-awareness in animals and humans: Developmental perspectives.

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Lecture/Discussion: How to get a good night’s sleep Health Writer Russell Wild has these suggestions for getting a good nights sleep. (1) Turn off the T.V. – this means the radio as well. (2) Turn off the lights because they block the sleep– promoting hormone melatonin … if you can get extra darkening window shades. (3) Go to bed the same time every night – those Copyright © 2016 Pearson Canada Inc. 287

Instructor’s Resource Manual for Psychology: An Exploration who do, research shows they get better sleep. (4) Go to bed sober – any alcohol may interfere with REM sleep.

(5) Eat you dinner early – 6 or 7 o’clock is best. If you need a snack try something that contains tryptophan – milk, yogurt, cheese, turkey or fish. Tryptophan is converted to serotonin, which will help you, feel drowsy. (6) Don’t exercise right before going to bed. (7) Read something that is good for you.

It is suggested that many people are not getting the amount of sleep that they need on an ongoing basis. This may be the cause of more automobile accidents and lowered job performance. This website: http://www.sleep-deprivation.com/ lists many of the causes of sleep deprivation as well as ways to remedy the problem.

Wild, R. (2004). Try Deze and doze. AARP: The Magazine, 99.

Lecture/Discussion: Sleeping Too Much?

Is it possible to get too much sleep? Most people who are returning to work after a long weekend would say “no!”

However, there are some researchers who seem to believe that there are some people who get too much sleep. A study in the journal Sleep has found after surveying more than 104,000 people in Japan ages 40–79, for nearly 10 years, found that those who reported sleeping eight or more hours a night were more at risk of death than those who slept seven hours. Overall, subjects who slept seven hours had the best survival rate. However, everyone does not need the same amount of sleep. You should strive to get the amount of sleep that makes you feel the best and stick with it.

Song, S. (2004, February 23). Sleepyheads. Time Magazine. Time Inc., New York.

Lecture/Discussion: Sleep Disorders and Treatment As many as 100 million Americans suffer from sleep disturbances or sleep disorders. Three major sleep disorders include sleep apnea, insomnia, and narcolepsy.

Approximately 18 million Americans have sleep apnea, which is characterized by brief interruptions of breathing during sleep. During any given night, the number of involuntary breathing interruptions can number up to 20 to 300 or more instances per hour. Two forms of sleep apnea include central sleep apnea and upper-airway sleep apnea. In central sleep apnea, the sleeper’s brain ceases to send signals to diaphragm, so the diaphragm stops functioning. In upper-airway sleep apnea, loss of muscle tone in the throat, tongue, and larynx can block breathing. This type of sleep apnea is also accompanied by loud snoring, as the sleeper tries to get air into the lungs. The sleeper often awakes after about 60–100 seconds of sleep and begins gasping for air, then falls back to sleep. Often, the sleeper is oblivious to frequent awakenings for air, and rarely remembers waking so many times during the night. Often, these individuals complain of insomnia. Experimental treatments include the Nasal CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure), in which a fan inside a mask is placed over the nose during sleep; the mouth must be closed, so there is a chinstrap to keep the mouth closed. A Stanford surgical procedure involves slicing tendons in the tongue to pull it away from the back of the throat.

Insomnia is characterized by a chronic inability to fall asleep at night and/or stay asleep. Factors that contribute to insomnia include: medical illness, including head trauma, asthma, hypertension, arthritis, headache and lower back pain, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and kidney/thyroid dysfunction; psychiatric illness, including major depression, PTSD, generalized anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder, dementia, and schizophrenia; medication and drugs, including alcohol, narcotics, amphetamines, caffeine, nicotine, and certain antidepressants; co-morbid sleep disorders, such as sleep apnea; poor sleep habits, such as extended time in bed, napping, and irregular sleep schedules; and situational factors, such as stress, bereavement, jet lag, shift work, poor sleeping environment (bad bed partner, noise, etc.).

Some of the most successful treatments for insomnia have been cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) treatments.

Behavioural sleep medicine experts suggest that individuals have chronic insomnia due to learned behaviours and thought patterns that get in the way of a good night’s sleep. They recommend a combination of methods to help individuals overcome their insomnia, including sleep education (e.g., learning about your own sleep and resting patterns), cognitive therapy (e.g., to change negative beliefs and thoughts about sleep), stimulus control (e.g., don’t Copyright © 2016 Pearson Canada Inc. 288

Chapter 6: Consciousness and Cognition drink a soda before you go to bed), sleep restriction (e.g., bed is only for sleeping and sex), and relaxation (e.g., progressive muscle relaxation at bedtime).

Narcolepsy, or “sleep attack,” is characterized by feeling sleepy all the time and falling asleep throughout the day without realizing it. We often think of dogs who are running across the yard, then suddenly fall asleep for a few minutes; this is the same sort of occurrence in adults. Approximately 1–5 individuals of every 5,000 are narcoleptic.

Often the sleep attack is triggered by an intensely experienced emotion, such as surprise, excitement, stress, or anger. The attacks last for about 5 minutes, but can last longer. Often, individuals with narcolepsy experience vivid dreams while awake, called hypnagogic hallucinations. Amphetamine drug treatment is one treatment used to maintain alertness, however this is not a cure for narcolepsy. More recently, Provigil has been approved by the FDA for the treatment of narcolepsy. Provigil is not an amphetamine, but how it works for treatment of narcolepsy is still a mystery.

National Center on Sleep Disorders Research, National Institutes of Health. www.nhlbi.nih.gov/about/ncsdr

Lecture/Discussion: Sleep and School Times Studies have shown that adolescents have greater sleep needs than adults, due to changes in circadian rhythms. If they are in their late adolescence, your students are likely to report preferring to go to sleep later at night and then to sleep later in the morning. In addition, adolescents face a need for a greater amount of sleep.

Ask students how this information can be used. For example, recently high schools have begun moving their start times to a later hour in the morning to accommodate these adolescent sleep needs. Schools that have taken this step report better attendance. However, this measure often causes a logical problem with bussing young children in the pre-dawn hours. In addition, later school start times may restrict teens’ abilities to participate in sports or to hold after-school jobs. Nevertheless, the findings from studies of adolescent sleep needs led Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) to propose the Z’s to A’s Act in March 2001. The act is designed to encourage school districts to delay school start times until after 9 a.m. by providing federal grants of up to $25,000 to cover the administrative and operating costs associated with making this transition. Would your students support such a bill? Do they wish that their schools had started later? What do they see as the pros and cons?

Additional source: ♦ Frontline: Inside the Teenage Brain http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/teenbrain/from

Lecture/Discussion: The Uberman Sleep Schedule A popular topic in Internet forums is the practice of “uberman sleep.” The uberman sleep schedule—also known as polyphasic sleep, or the Da Vinci sleep schedule—involves replacing your normal night’s sleep with a series of short naps throughout the day and night, thereby decreasing the total amount of total time spent sleeping to 2–5 hours per 24-hour day. Supposedly, Leonardo da Vinici’s incredible productivity was, in part, due to his use of this system to increase the number of hours available to work in each day. Whether this is fact or myth, the question remains: Does the uberman sleep schedule work?

Numerous anecdotal accounts of individuals trying the uberman sleep schedule exist on the Internet. In general, people attempting to switch to the new schedule report difficulty and fatigue for the first week or two. Several of these self-accounts indicate that after this initial period, they were able to adapt to the new sleep schedule and were able to sleep for as few as 2 hours per day without feeling fatigued. However, most people attempting this lifestyle change do report several problems with the uberman sleep schedule. For example, the uberman system requires a great deal of effort to maintain the schedule of short naps. Oversleeping or missing nap periods could throw the whole system off. However, the biggest problem people often encounter when attempting the uberman sleep schedule is that we live in a regular sleep-cycle world. Having a sleep cycle that is so different from almost everyone

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Instructor’s Resource Manual for Psychology: An Exploration around you can cause many social and work-related problems. In fact, many of the individuals who have tried it report returning to a normal sleep schedule for this reason.

Many experts question whether long-term use of the uberman sleep schedule without negative side effects is possible.

They point out that the body and brain are hardwired to follow an approximately 24-hour circadian rhythm. It seems unlikely that the body would ever be able to fully overcome this natural sleep–wake pattern. Still, it appears that for short periods of time, short naps spread throughout the day may be one possible way to find some extra time in the day!

Breus, M. (2007, June 15). Why you can’t hack sleep. Retrieved December 14, 2009, from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-michael-jbreus/why-you-cant-hack-sleep_b_52047.html.

Pavlina, S. (2006, April 12). Polyphasic sleep: The return to monophasic. Retrieved December 14, 2009, from http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/04/polyphasic-sleep-the-return-to-monophasic/.

Lecture/Discussion: Drowsy Driving Because drowsy driving occurs so frequently, it warrants additional attention during class. Present the warning signs of drowsy driving (see the Sleep Foundation Web site, listed below). Ask students what they do when they feel tired behind the wheel. Point out that many of their ideas (e.g., cracking the window, blasting the music) are unlikely to prevent them from entering into microsleeps. Give them some alternatives that might work (e.g., caffeine or—even better—taking a break to nap).

In addition, ask students to consider whether technological advances might help to ward off drowsy driving. For example, BMW has been testing a “driving alertness assistant,” a built-in warning system that monitors eye movements to determine drivers’ alertness. See the online article “You May Be Sleeping at the Wheel,” by Annelena Lobb, for more information (http://money.cnn.com/2002/09/05/pf/autos/q_microsleep/).

Finally, lead a discussion (or a debate) about whether there should be laws against knowingly driving while drowsy.

Additional sources: • Distracted Driving, by CAA: http://www.caa.ca/working-for-you/safe-driving/distracted-driving/ • Drowsy Driving, by AAA: http://www.aaafoundation.org/resources/index.cfm?button=drowsyfaq • Smart Drivers Brake for Sleep: http://www.drowsydriving.cornell.edu/ Lecture/Discussion: The Bitter Taste of Drugged Sleep Sleeping pills and tranquilizers are often taken to get a night of good sleep. The same pills that initially may bring sought-after sleep to the weary insomniac can, over a period of time, profoundly disturb sleep. Reliance on sleeping pills can: • • • • • •

change the percentage of REM and NREM sleep experienced; cause insomnia; reduce certain deeper stages of sleep; cause withdrawal experiences of nightmares; result in more REM sleep than usual (called REM rebound); and sometimes even cause convulsive seizures.

Barbiturates are commonly prescribed in the United States to decrease insomnia, yet they are commonly abused. They are the most common chemicals causing death by suicide. Studies have conclusively shown that barbiturates decrease the percentage of REM sleep during the night. With prolonged use there is a loss of this REM suppressant effect and, when the drug is withdrawn after chronic use, an REM rebound effect occurs. Barbiturates do increase total sleep time.

Alcohol also increases total sleep time but decreases REM sleep, particularly in the first half of the night. This is the effect of acute alcohol ingestion on sleep in normal humans. Withdrawal from alcohol after taking it several days often results in a pronounced REM rebound. This REM rebound is actually larger than that following withdrawal of

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Chapter 6: Consciousness and Cognition barbiturates or any other drug. The hallucinatory experiences of individuals with delirium tremens (DTs) where they report seeing bugs and other things crawling around may be related to the underlying physiology of the REM state.

It is a general pharmacological rule that many chemical agents decrease REM sleep. In addition to alcohol and barbiturates, morphine, heroin, amphetamines, narcotics, and acute doses of marijuana produce similar effects on sleep. Those few drugs (e.g., LSD and reserpine) that increase REM sleep interact with the brain serotonin, whereas those that reduce it do not.

Lecture/Discussion: Types of Problems Sometimes the kinds of problems you have to solve determine the way you try to solve them. There are basically three kinds of problems: arrangement, inducing structure, and transformation.

Arrangement Problems Arrangement problems are those in which it is necessary to rearrange the information you have. Anagrams, a type of puzzle in which letters must be rearranged to form a familiar word, are a good example of this problem type. What common word, for example, could be made from the letters bemnur?

(The answer is “number.”)

Jigsaw puzzles are also arrangement problems, as are puzzles or tasks that require you to put certain pictures or events in order. When an investigator of a crime tries to recreate the sequence of events, it is also a problem of arrangement.

Problems of Inducing Structure If you have ever faced a puzzle that involved finding the next number or letter in a sequence, you have been trying to induce (reason from the specific examples to a general solution) structure. What is the next letter in this sequence?

S M T W T F __ This is not only a good example of inducing structure; it’s also a good example of insight. Once you realize that the letters are the first letters of the days of the week, “S” becomes an easy answer.

Transformation Problems In a transformation problem, one has to carry out a sequence or series of transformations, or changes, to solve the problem. The 3-cup and 5-cup measure problem would be a simple example of this type. Another example would be to try to solve the “Tower of Hanoi” puzzle mentioned in Chapter Six (the one in which the rings have to be moved from one post to another without ever putting a big one on a little one, or moving more than one at a time—Figure 6.4).

Lecture/Discussion: Intuition Psychologists have long been interested in understanding reasoning, problem solving, and decision making. But the other, “softer” side of this cognitive coin is the study of intuition; how we develop a “gut feeling” or “sense” about a judgment, situation, or another person. Far from relying on an aching bunion or creaky joint to understand intuition, scientists have recently put the notion to the test.

Antonio Damasio and his colleagues at the University of Iowa College of Medicine studied 6 people who had damage to the ventromedial sector of the prefrontal cortex and 10 people who did not. This area of the brain is responsible for storing information about emotional experiences and is also involved in decision-making. Armed with $2,000 in fake money, the participants were presented with four decks of cards and were told they could turn over cards from any deck during the course of a game. Unbeknownst to the participants, two decks were rigged to produce lower immediate rewards but a higher overall payoff, whereas the other two decks yielded short-term, large payoffs but at the price of greater total losses. Participants flipped cards at will while being monitored for GSR as an Copyright © 2016 Pearson Canada Inc. 291

Instructor’s Resource Manual for Psychology: An Exploration indicator of nonconscious (or conscious) anxiety. After the first 20 rounds the research team questioned the participants, and did so again after each subsequent 10 rounds, in order to determine when the participants became conscious of the best strategy to win.

Those participants without brain damage began to show signs of anxiety before picking cards from the losing decks, and began to avoid those decks, although consciously they were not yet aware that they were losers. By the 80th round 7 of the 10 normal participants consciously knew to avoid the losing decks, and although the remaining 3 did not reach that insight, they nonetheless continued to make advantageous choices. The 6 brain-damaged participants, however, continued to pick from the losing decks, never expressed a hunch that something was amiss, and never showed signs of anxiety. In short, the intuition or unconscious knowledge that arose in the normal subjects was absent in the impaired group; there never arose a “sense” or “feeling” of what was going on.

One study digs deeper to the roots of intuition. A team of researchers led by David Skuse, a psychiatrist at the Institute of Child Development of University College in London, found evidence suggesting intuition is an inherited trait passed from fathers to their daughters. Skuse and his colleagues defined intuition in terms of social skills, such as the ability to decode nonverbal communication or recognize socially appropriate behaviour. Although the research team has not identified a gene (or genes) responsible for these abilities, their patterns of evidence suggest a specific chain of inheritance. The parents of 88 girls with Turner’s syndrome (characterized by a single X chromosome) were asked to rate their daughters on various measures of social intelligence, such as awareness of other’s feelings, skill at following instructions, or awareness of offending others. The researchers next determined whether each girl’s single X chromosome had come from her father or mother. The results revealed that those girls who had inherited the mother’s chromosome scored worse on the measures of “intuition” than did those receiving the X from their fathers.

Parents of normal boys and girls were also asked the same questions. The boys, compared to the normal girls, scored lower on the measures of social intuition: Like all boys, they also received their X chromosome from their mothers.

Furthermore, the researchers also compared the responses of the Turner’s syndrome girls with those of normal boys and girls on a battery of neuropsychological measures. Turner’s syndrome girls who received their X chromosome from their mothers scored worse on tests that required extensive planning or the inhibition of urges; normal boys also scored worse on the inhibition measures (but not the planning tasks).

Brown, D. (June 12, 1997). Women inherit intuition from dads, researchers say. Austin American-Statesman, A1, A6.

Stein, R. (March 9, 1997). Intuition affects sensible choices, researchers find. Austin American-Statesman, A25.

Lecture/Discussion: Don’t Believe Everything You Read…Except This People sometimes believe in things they ought not to, such as flat Earths, cheese moons, or their own invulnerability. But forming and clinging to misbegotten beliefs may itself be a consequence of some fundamental cognitive processes, such as how information gets encoded in memory or what happens to a disrupted attentional system.

Dan Gilbert, of Harvard University, has been exploring the problem of “believing what isn’t so” for several years. In explaining the process by which such belief takes place he invokes the thinking of Rene Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, both of whom wrote quite a bit about how information is perceived and stored in a mental system.

Descartes argued that information is first comprehended, and then in a subsequent step, a truth value is assigned to it: We decide to accept or reject the information as being true. This would suggest, of course, that we can easily entertain ideas (indefinitely, perhaps...putting them up in a mental guest room, so to speak) without necessarily putting stock in them. If comprehension (understanding) of information and endorsement (acceptance or rejection) are two distinct steps, humans should be able to hold an idea without believing it.

Spinoza adopted a different position on the nature of belief, arguing that comprehension and acceptance of information are accomplished in a single initial step, only later to be followed by certification or rejection of the information. This view holds that the very act of receiving information entails assigning a belief to it [“this information is true” (or false, as the case might be)], which only later can be substantiated or “unbelieved,” as might

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Chapter 6: Consciousness and Cognition be called for. Quite unlike Descartes, then, Spinoza argued that ideas could not be entertained, “beliefless,” in a cognitive system, but rather are believed upon first being received into the cognitive system.

How to disentangle these competing predictions? Notice that both, if allowed to run their course, would lead to the same outcome: The acceptance or rejection of information as being true. The difference lies in when the belief is assigned, either in a Spinozan first step or in a Cartesian second step. Gilbert reasoned, then, that disrupting a belief system in action would be the only way to tell which system (Spinozan or Cartesian) was at work. If Descartes was correct, disrupting the system between steps should have no effect on cognition: We would be left holding a collection of ideas that had not yet been assigned truth values. If Spinoza was correct, however, disruption should produce a very pronounced tendency: We should be left believing information to be true (since it was automatically tagged with a truth valued upon entering the cognitive system) when in some cases it is not.

To test these ideas, Gilbert and his colleagues asked research participants in one of several experiments to learn some (fictitious) Hopi language terms. Participants saw a Hopi/English word-pairing flash on a computer screen (such as “A monishna is a star,” “A rirg is a valley,” or “A neseti is a bee”), which was followed by a brief pause, and then followed by one of three outcomes: The word “True” (signaling that the preceding pairing was accurate), the word “False” (indicating that the preceding pairing was incorrect), or a blank screen. Note that Descartes and Spinoza are still neck-and-neck at this point. Either account of belief would argue that participants could take in the information (untouched, as Descartes would have it, or believed as true, as Spinoza would have it) and then correct it based on the True or False cue later given (which would mean assigning a belief in the Cartesian system, or revising/substantiating an existing belief in the Spinozan system). However, the researchers asked participants to do one additional task. On some trials participants were asked to press a button if they heard a particular tone. This additional task served to tax their available cognitive resources, making it more difficult to perform the correction step of integrating the true/false cues with the prior information. These participants, however, provided an answer to the riddle of belief. When later polled they showed a particular pattern of errors; namely, they were left believing propositions that should have been revised (i.e., those tagged as “False”) as being true. Given the controls of the experiment, the only way to account for this outcome is that the information must have been encoded as true upon first being read (just as Spinoza argued). Because these resource-depleted subjects were disrupted from performing Spinoza’s second task (certifying or, in these cases, rejecting the previously-believed information), they were left believing what they ought not to.

The implications of this research are startling. For example, as Dan Wegner and his colleagues have shown, it may help explain the workings of innuendo. When presented with information that may or may not be correct, our Spinozan belief system compels us to endorse that information upon comprehension. If our cognitive resources are later disrupted we may be unable to correct our initial comprehension. Similarly, this research may help explain why belief perseverance takes place. If the stage of correcting initial information is subject to disruption, we may be left clinging to beliefs even in the face of clearly disconfirming evidence. Finally, these results fly in the face of what your parents always told you. Far from “not believing everything you read,” it seems that we can’t escape that fate.

Gilbert, D. T. (1993). The assent of man: Mental representation and the control of belief. In D. M. Wegner & J. W. Pennebaker (Eds.), Handbook of mental control (pp. 57–87). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Gilbert, D. T. (1991). How mental systems believe. American Psychologist, 46, 107–119.

Gilbert, D. T., Krull, D. S., & Malone, P. S. (1990). Unbelieving the unbelievable: Some problems in the rejection of false information.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59, 601–613.

Ross, L., Lepper, M. R., & Hubbard, M. (1975). Perseverance in self-perception and social perception: Biased attributional processes in the debriefing paradigm. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32, 880–892.

Wegner, D. M., Wenzlaff, R., Kerker, R. M., & Beattie, A. E. (1981). Incrimination through innuendo: Can media questions become public answers? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 40, 822–832.

Lecture/Discussion: Are We Good at Making Decisions In a classic paper, the psychologist Helmut Jungermann divided academics studying decision making into two “camps.” Those in the first camp believe that humans are essentially irrational and that they tend to make poor decisions in a variety of situations. To support this argument, members of the first camp usually point to the researchers Tversky and Kahneman, who have demonstrated that biases often lead to illogical decisions. On the other hand, members of the second camp argue that, while people do sometimes make poor decisions, we are generally rational. After all, some argue, how could we be so successful as a species if we are inherently irrational Copyright © 2016 Pearson Canada Inc. 293

Instructor’s Resource Manual for Psychology: An Exploration decision makers? Many in this camp believe that much of the research designed to study decision making is specifically designed to generate poor decisions, and that the same decision processes that lead to biased decisions in laboratory experiments actually lead to good decisions more often than not in real-world situations.

Describe the two camps of thought on human decision making with the class. You may want to poll your students to see how many fall into each camp. Then, ask for volunteers to share their opinions on the topic. What evidence is there that people tend to make poor decisions? What evidence is there that people tend to make good decisions? At the conclusion of the discussion, poll your students again to see if the discussion affected how many students fall into each camp. Following the discussion, ask students to respond to the writing prompt below.

Writing Prompt: Choose a bias or heuristic that can lead to poor decisions and describe it. Then, describe a situation in which it would likely cause a person to make a poor decision.

Sample answer: The availability heuristic is a tool for figuring out how likely something is based on how easily a person can remember it happening. For example, a person may decide not to order fish at a restaurant because it is easy for them to recall stories about people getting sick from seafood at similar restaurants. Unfortunately, the availability heuristic can lead to poor decisions when the availability of a memory is not representative of its likelihood. For example, a person might decide that it is not safe to fly in a plane because it is easy for them to recall plane crashes. In this case, the fact that plane crashes are very memorable creates the false sense that they are common, which they are not.

Jungermann, H. (1986). The two camps on rationality. In H. Arkes & K. Hammond (Eds.), Judgment and decision making: An interdisciplinary reader. (pp. 627–641). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Lecture/Discussion: Functional Fixedness To demonstrate functional fixedness, gather a number of household items, such as an egg carton, film container, baby food jar, nail, paper clip, baking cup, empty toilet paper roll, piece of string, paper napkin, clothes pin, safety pin, Band-aid, and cotton ball. You may wish to have several of each item depending on how many students are in your class.

Arrange the class in small groups and have each group choose several items. Their task is to brainstorm as many new uses for their items as possible in the time allowed. For four or five items, allow 10 to 15 minutes. Have each group report their results to the class.

The following discussion should allow you to reinforce ideas about the nature of creativity and the meaning of functional fixedness. If a person suggests using a baby food jar to store small items such as buttons, this is still fixating on the function of the jar as a container. A more creative suggestion would be to break the jar and use a piece for cutting, or to draw around it to make a circle.

Lecture/Discussion: The Influence of Language on Thought In George Orwell’s chilling novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, a totalitarian government tries to narrow thought by shrinking language. The result, called Newspeak, is supposed to wipe out “thoughtcrime” by obliterating the words needed to commit it. “We’re destroying words—scores of them, hundreds of them, every day,” boasts a worder in the ironically named Ministry of Truth. “We’re cutting the language down to the bone.” Words also get new meanings: War is peace, love is hate. (Lest anyone think Orwell’s projections were pure fantasy, in recent years leaders in our own government have called lying “mis-speaking,” the wartime killing of civilians “collateral damage,” the accidental killing of American soldiers by their own side “friendly fire,” nuclear missiles “peacekeepers,” and tax increases “revenue enhancement.”)

Was Orwell right? Does language provide a mental straitjacket for thought? Can we think only what we can say? Or does language merely express ideas and perceptions that would exist anyway?

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The leading spokesperson for the notion that language shapes thought was Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941), an insurance inspector by profession and a linguist and anthropologist by inclination. His theory of linguistic relativity held that (1) language molds habits of both cognition and perception and (2) different languages point speakers toward different views of reality. Whorf sometimes seemed to believe that language determines thought in an absolute way. He once wrote, “We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages” (Whorf, 1956). But usually he took the more moderate position that language has a powerful influence on cognition.

Whorf’s evidence was linguistic and cultural. For example, he noted that English has only one word for snow, but Eskimos (now called the Inuit) have different words for falling snow, slushy snow, powdered snow, and so forth. On the other hand, the Hopi have a single noun that refers to all flying things and beings, with the exception of birds.

This word can be used for aphids, airplanes, and aviators. Thus the Inuit presumably would notice differences in snow that people in other cultures would not, and Hopis might see similarities between insects and aviators that others would miss. Since Whorf’s time, other writers have added examples of their own. Chinese, for instance, has at least nineteen words for silk, but (in keeping with the reticence of the Chinese about discussing sexual matters) it has no common word for either foreplay or orgasm, making it something of a challenge to do sex surveys in China (Kristof, 1991)! In English, much has been written about how the very word foreplay limits sexual imagination.

Why are all activities other than intercourse merely “fore” play?

Whorf felt that grammar had an even greater influence on thought than did separate words. He argued, for example, that grammar affects how we think of time. English verbs, he noted, force people to emphasize when an action took place; you can’t talk about seeing Joan without saying whether you saw her, see her now, or will see her. But Hopi verbs do not require these distinctions. Instead, they allow a speaker to convey whether he or she experienced the action personally, observed it, heard about it, or inferred it. Further, English speakers refer to time as a thing that can be saved, squandered, or spent, or as something that can be measured; we say time is short, long, or great.

The linguistic differences pointed out by Whorf and others have fascinated students and teachers for generations.

Clearly culture and language are intertwined: English is full of sports metaphors (“I scored some points with my boss,” “She plays hardball in negotiations”), whereas French is rich in food metaphors (un navet, “a turnip,” means a bad film, and C’est la fin des haricots! “This is the last of the stringbeans,” is equivalent to “It’s the last straw”) (Halpern, 1991). But does language shape thought, or does it merely reflect cultural concerns? Critics note that it is easy enough to describe in English what the various Inuit words for snow mean or how Hopis conceive of time, despite linguistic differences. Within a culture, when a need to express some unlabeled phenomenon arises, speakers easily manufacture new words. Like the Inuit, English-speaking skiers need to talk about several kinds of snow, so they speak of powder, corn, and boilerplate (ice).

Linguistic evidence alone cannot prove that language determines, or even influences thought. Do the Inuit perceive snow differently from people who have fewer words for it? Do Hopis experience time differently because of their grammar? We cannot know, unless linguistic evidence is supplemented by psychological evidence, and unfortunately, the few psychological studies that have been done have been inconclusive, mainly because of difficulties in studying this question.

Yet the theory of linguistic relativity, which has sometimes seemed deader than a dinosaur, keeps springing back to life. Within a language, it is easier to process some words and grammatical constructions than others; it is reasonable to assume, then, that it is easier to think certain thoughts in one language than another, because of the words and grammatical constructions the languages require (Hunt & Agnoli, 1991). Further, recent research suggests that languages may, at the very least, influence the acquisition of specific mental skills, by guiding attention in particular directions.

For example, Irene Miura and her colleagues (Miura et al., 1988; Miura & Okamoto, 1989) argue that linguistic differences can help explain why Asian children tend to outperform English-speaking children on tests of numerical ability. In many Asian languages, names of numbers reflect a base-10 system: the label for 12 is “ten-two,” the label for 22 is “two ten(s)-two,” and so forth. These names may help children understand numbers and simple arithmetic.

In a study of Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and English-speaking American first-graders, Miura and her associates (1988) had children stack blocks to represent five different quantities. White blocks stood for single units and blue Copyright © 2016 Pearson Canada Inc. 295

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blocks for tens units. Each child had two chances to show the numbers. Most of the Asian children could express all five numbers in more than one way, for example, 12 as either 12 white blocks or 1 blue block and 2 white ones. But only 13 percent of the American children could do the same; most simply used a collection of white blocks. Further, on their first try most of the Asian children used patterns corresponding to written numbers, for example, 2 tens and 8 ones for 28. But only 8 percent of the American children did so. Of course, these results do not prove that linguistic differences are responsible for the differences in math achievement. It is interesting, though, that bilingual Asian-American students tend to score higher in math achievement than do those who speak only English (Moore & Stanley, 1986).

Finally, language affects social perceptions (Henley, 1989). In the previous sentence, you read the name of a psychologist. Would you be at all surprised to learn it was Nancy Henley? Feminists have long observed that in much of our writing, humanity is male and women are outsiders, the “second sex.” This is why they have long objected to the use of men or mankind to refer to humanity, and he to refer to any person, sex unspecified.

Language, then, can influence thinking, reasoning, and social stereotypes. It allows us to manipulate symbols rather than objects. It directs our attention. It allows us to create detailed plans for the future. But the degree to which linguistic differences between cultures result in different ways of thinking and perceiving remains an open question.

Lecture/Discussion: Eye-Tongue Coordination “Put the apple on the towel in the box.” The ambiguity inherent in this sentence can lead to great confusion. Should the apple that’s currently on the towel go in the box? Should the towel lying near the apple first go in the box, followed by the apple on top of it? Or should the apple be placed on the towel in the box, rather than on the plate that’s in the box?

Until recently, most views of speech comprehension emphasized the decoding of grammar, followed by a search for contextual clues that might aid in following a command. The grammar in this example illustrates that sometimes that can be a tall order. A recent study, however, suggests that visual cues irrelevant to grammar play a prominent early role in influencing message comprehension. A combination of visual and linguistic information helps us to better understand what others tell us.

A research team led by Michael K. Tanenhaus at the University of Rochester tracked the eye movements of volunteers while they listened to a variety of messages. These simple commands asked them to manipulate objects that were visible in the laboratory. The researchers found that people look at targets as soon as they hear words that distinguish the target from other items. As an example, when asked to “touch the starred yellow square” participants took about a quarter-second to look at the correct target (that lay among other unstarred blocks) after hearing the word “starred.” However, if the items included two starred yellow blocks, participants looked at the target after hearing the word “square.”

But where does the apple go? When presented with either an ambiguous phrase (“Put the apple on the towel in the box”) or an unambiguous one (“Put the apple that’s on the towel in the box”) participants’ eye movements differed.

As they heard a particular command, participants viewed either a display with an apple set on a towel, another towel without an apple, a box, and a pencil; or a similar arrangement in which the pencil was replaced by an additional apple on a napkin. When faced with only one apple, the ambiguous phrase led participants to glance at the towel after hearing “towel,” showing their inclination that the apple should be placed there, then both placed in the box.

Those participants given the unambiguous phrase, however, never glanced at the towel. When the two-apple arrangement was presented, however, both ambiguous and unambiguous instructions produced the same patterns of eye movements. Participants looked from one apple to the other upon hearing the word “apple,” then looked at the appropriate apple upon hearing the word “towel,” and made no further eye movements until hearing the word “box.”

An apple on a towel in a box illustrates the coordination that takes place between vision and hearing in speech comprehension. But if the apple stays in the box it doesn’t do much for the hearing-hunger connection.

Bower, B. (1995). Understanding speech: I see what you mean. Science News, 147, 373.

Reprinted from Alan Swinkels (2003). Instructor’s resource manual for Psychology by S. Kassin. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall

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Chapter 6: Consciousness and Cognition Lecture/Discussion: Nonverbal Gestures The study of nonverbal gestures and their meaning has received extensive research attention in psychology, sociology, and communication. Through basic research we know a great deal about what gestures convey, how they are culturally variable, and how they act as cues to emotional and other internal states of a communicator. Roger Axtell, former international business executive and now professional speaker and author, has cataloged a variety of gestures and their appropriate uses in cultures around the world. His collection of examples shows clearly that an intended message may not always be communicated successfully. Some common miscommunicated meanings include: • The “two-fingered salute.” In most of the contemporary world flashing the index and middle finger in a “V” shape, palm outward, signifies “victory” or “peace” (depending on the vintage of the communicator).

However, in England, Australia, and several other countries, a simple turn of the wrist (flashing the sign with the palm toward the communicator) changes this gesture to a highly insulting one: a two-fingered version of our “one-fingered salute.”

• “The fig.” Brazilians clench their fists with a thumb jutting between the index and middle fingers to signal good luck and help in warding off evil spirits. In Greece and Turkey, however, this same gesture is quite insulting, whereas in Holland and Tunisia it has sexual connotations.

• “Hook ‘em Horns.” Texans, especially Austinites, know that an outstretched index and pinky finger signal a cheer for the University of Texas Longhorns to do well on the playing field. This same gesture signals a curse in Africa, a good luck sign in Brazil, and an Italian chide that the recipient is being cuckolded.

• Signalling that someone is “crazy” can take on a variety of forms. In Germany it is done by rotating the forefingers back and forth around one’s temples. Italians send the same message by tapping their hands to their foreheads. To complicate matters, in Holland a forefinger to the temple means “intelligent” whereas a forefinger to the forehead signals “crazy.” The common North American gesture of a circular motion around the temple actually signals, “There’s a phone call” among Argentineans.

• “Nice job!” Flashing a “thumbs up” to a friend usually signals that the person has done well or that the communicator wishes good luck. In Australia, however, it is considered the equivalent of the “two-fingered salute” discussed above, whereas in Japan it signals “five,” in Germany it indicates “one,” and in Bangladesh it is considered obscene.

• “Pointing” is accomplished in North America and Europe by using the index finger. In Malaysia the thumb is preferred, whereas in Japan and China an open hand is used.

• The “hand sweep.” Moving one’s hand and arm across a table in a sweeping motion signals “someone is stealing” in Latin American countries. In Peru, this same gesture means “pay me.”

• Extending the palm of the hand toward someone might be a way of saying “no more” or “no thanks.” In Greece, however, it is an extremely insulting gesture mimicking shoving dirt (and other brown matter) into someone’s face.

Axtell, R. E. (1991). Gestures: The do’s and taboos of body language around the world. New York: Wiley.

Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1969). The repertoire of nonverbal behavior: Categories, origins, usage, and coding. Semiotica, 1, 49–98.

Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1972). Hand movements. Journal of Communication, 22, 353–374.

Lecture/Discussion: Who Talks More: Men or Women?

Women talk a lot more than men, right? A long-standing stereotype of the socially gifted, talkative woman is contrasted with the stereotypical male: somewhat guarded, less social, and less talkative. Do experimental data bear these stereotypes out? In 2006, Louann Brizendine, founder and director of the University of California, San Francisco’s Women’s Mood and Hormone Clinic, published The Female Brain. In it was a claim that women speak an average of 20,000 words per day, nearly three times the mere 7,000 spoken by men. This seemingly sensational claim was immediately questioned by James Pennebaker, a psychologist at University of Texas, Austin. In a series of studies (prior to the publishing of Brizendine’s controversial book) at schools in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, researchers used an electronically activated recorder to record samples of male and female students’ talking for 17 hours per day. From the samples of 396 students (210 females and 186 males) it was estimated that women and men speak roughly the same number of words per day. Women were found to speak an average of 16,215 words per day whereas men speak 15,669. This result does not even approach statistical significance, and calls into question Brizendine’s claim. Moreover, Pennebaker’s findings indicate that the stereotypes of the talkative woman / Copyright © 2016 Pearson Canada Inc. 297

Instructor’s Resource Manual for Psychology: An Exploration reserved man are simply psychomythology. A discussion of these findings will nicely illustrate how sound psychological experimentation can lead to the truth. Additionally, most students hold these stereotypes, and this discussion should elucidate the power of stereotypes—some students who, even when faced with strong scientific evidence to the contrary, will maintain their views.

Lecture/Discussion: The Genetics of Language FOXP2, a gene that controls the expression of other genes, is sometimes referred to as “the language gene.” While this may be an overstatement, a series of studies involving FOXP2 have shown that it does play an important role in our ability to use language.

The connection between language and FOXP2 was first discovered by geneticists studying a family with a rare, inherited disorder. About half of the members of the KE family—as they are known—suffer from this disorder, which causes severe language impairments. Effected members have difficulty with grammar, writing, and understanding speech. In addition, the disorder also causes difficulty in controlling the facial muscles necessary for speaking. Genetic analysis revealed that only members of the KE family with the disorder had a mutated form of the FOXP2 gene, suggesting that the non-mutated FOXP2 gene is necessary for normal language production, comprehension, and grammar use.

Subsequent investigation of the FOXP2 gene has shown that many other animals have a similar gene. However, the protein FOXP2 codes for is slightly different in nonhuman primates like chimpanzees and gorillas. This has lead some to suggest that a mutation in the FOXP2 gene, following our evolutionary split from chimpanzees, is the reason why humans developed the use of language and other primates did not.

In 2009, researchers created a transgenic mouse in which the mouse FOXP2 gene was replaced with the human version. The brains of these mice were structurally different than normal mice, showing that the human FOXP2 gene affected the development of the mice’s central nervous system. Most intriguing was the fact that the squeaks of these transgenic mice were also affected. However, whether this change in vocalization is related to the role of FOXP2 in human language is not clear. Future research is clearly needed to discover exactly what role this gene plays in our ability to use language.

Yong, E. (2009, November 11). Revisiting FOXP2 and the origins of language. Retrieved November 29, 2009, from http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2009/11/revisiting_foxp2_and_the_origins_of_language.php.

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Chapter 6: Consciousness and Cognition

CLASSROOM ACTIVITIES, DEMONSTRATIONS, AND EXERCISES Exploring the Stream of Consciousness Working Shifts Losing the Alarm Clock Sleep Needs Circadian Rhythms Learning a Concept Mental Imagery Problem Representation Insight Availability Heuristics Breaking Sets in Problem-Solving Demonstrating Cognitive Biases Creative Thinking Mental Sets in Everyday Life Creativity Quiz Context and Speech Perception Non-sexist Language Channels of Communication Do Animals Have Language? A Survey Exploring Bilingualism Is Reading Automatic? A Survey Doing Something New Crossword Puzzle Fill-in-the-Blank Activity: Exploring the Stream of Consciousness The textbook notes that there are many natural fluctuations in consciousness and that as a result our awareness of our mental processes ebbs and flows continuously throughout the day. Using a modification of a procedure developed by Klinger, your students can record changes in their consciousness that occur during the class period. At the beginning of class distribute copies of the data sheet provided in Handout 6.1 to your students. Explain to them that at four intervals during the class, you will stop the lecture and ask them to write down what they were thinking about when the interruption occurred. You should emphasize that their recordings should be honest, free-flowing, and accurate and that the sheets will not be collected in order to maintain their anonymity. You should arrange the demonstration so that the last interruption occurs about 15 minutes before the end of class to allow time for discussion of the results. Discuss the results within the context of daydreaming and ask students to relate their data to the descriptions of daydream content described in the textbook. For example, you can ask students how many of their thought records reflected something related to the lecture or class. How many were related to worry, stress, guilt, or hostility? How many daydreams reflected positive, happy thoughts? You can also discuss the relationship between the fantasy-prone personality and creativity, as well as the many positive aspects of daydreaming (e.g., it helps to build cognitive skills, relieve tension, and incorporate new, complex information).

Klinger, E. (1990). Daydreaming: Using waking fantasy and imagery for self-knowledge and creativity. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher.

Adapted from Hill, W. G. (1995). Instructor’s resource manual for Psychology by S. F. Davis and J. J. Palladino. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

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Instructor’s Resource Manual for Psychology: An Exploration Activity: Working Shifts If you decide to talk about the effects of variable shift work, mention that some of your students are future managers and supervisors who will determine other people’s work schedules. Therefore, this topic will be especially important to them. Ask for a show of hands of those students who have worked on rotating shifts or have parents or close friends who have done so. If some students have worked variable shifts, ask them to describe their experiences including how long they held the job, the number of hours they worked, which shift they worked, and how often they rotated to a different shift. How did shift work affect job satisfaction, productivity, and personal relationships?

Others might comment on how shift work affected their family structure or friendship patterns. Ask about sleep schedules with working the night shift. You can point out that a significant number of accidents (e.g., Three Mile Island) have occurred during the middle of the night when people are less alert.

Activity: Losing the Alarm Clock Sleep brings both psychological (e.g., memory consolidation, increase lengths of attention, decrease probabilities of boredom) and physical (e.g., cell regeneration, increase levels of insulin and leptin) benefits. However, the vast majority of Americans today are not getting enough sleep (National Sleep Foundation, http://www.sleepfoundation.org )—and therefore these psychological and physical benefits are not being gained by most Americans. In this outside-of-the-class activity, have your students get rid of their alarm clocks for two weeks.

Yes, you heard me right—you are going to have your students get rid of their alarm clocks for two weeks. (It takes the body about two weeks to adapt to a new sleeping schedule.) Why are you having your students getting rid of their alarm clocks? To allow them to regain the benefits of getting a FULL night’s sleep: longer attention spans, better learning, better memory consolidation, losing weight, better hunger control and eating baits. The brain and body naturally know how long they should be sleeping without being artificially interrupted by an alarm clock.

(We don’t use an alarm clock to initiate sleep!) While your students are participating in this activity have them keep an experimenter’s log book. Have your students keep track of the times they are going to bed at night (should be a consistent time) and what time they are waking up in the mornings. Additionally, have your students keep track of their alertness, learning and memory capabilities over the two-week span. Lastly, have your students keep track of their weight, appetite, and eating behaviours during this time.

This activity initiates discussions about the psychological and physical benefits of sleep: Including such things as attention, learning, memory, boredom, diabetes, obesity, and general physical health. Additionally, this activity initiates discussions about the effects of living in a 24-hour society.

Activity: Sleep Needs This flexible exercise allows students to compare the sleep needs of human and animals. One way to do this is to have students estimate the amount of sleep they need to be fully rested each night. Their estimates should be in half hour increments (e.g., 6 ½ hours, or 9 hours). Students should order themselves and find their exact place in line.

You may want to tape numbers to the floor ranging from 5 – 10. Students will be able to see that the majority of the class needs between 7-8 hours of sleep. However, there are some students who are short sleepers, and others that are long sleepers. While not as common, needing more or less sleep is completely normal. An alternative exercise is to pass out a piece of paper to each student with the name of an animal and the average amount of sleep that animal needs. Make sure to include the human animal! Students should order themselves and find their exact place in line.

This exercise shows that humans need a moderate amount of sleep compared to other animals. You can call on students at the ends of the line to talk about animals that need lots of sleep or very little sleep.

Marin, A. J. (2011). Interactive Learning Companion. Boston: Pearson Education, Inc.

Activity: Circadian Rhythms Using the three-step-interview technique, team members divide into A’s and B’s. Using the questions below, A’s interview B’s and determine whether they are morning people, evening people, or neither. B’s then interview the Copyright © 2016 Pearson Canada Inc. 300

Chapter 6: Consciousness and Cognition A’s, using the same questions. The pairs reunite and share their responses with the team. The teams may also discuss the advantages and disadvantages to morning dominance vs. evening dominance. They can also discuss how their circadian rhythms have influenced their personal life, their employment, or their education.

Sample questions: 1. If you were going to do a new difficult workout program lasting an hour a day, which hour of the day would you choose to do it?

2. You have an important research paper to write for school, would you rather get up early and write it, or stay up late at night to write it?

3. Ideally, what time of the day would you like to get up?

4. Ideally, what time of the day would you like to go to sleep?

5. How easy do you find getting up in the morning?

6. How alert are you in the first half-hour after waking in the morning?

7. If you could choose the hours for an 8 hour work shift, what would you choose?

Marin, A. J. (2011). Interactive Learning Companion. Boston: Pearson Education, Inc.

Activity: Learning a Concept Objective: To demonstrate concept learning Materials: 3 x 5 index cards Procedure: Draw one square and one triangle on each index card. The figures should vary in size (large/small), colour (green/red), and position (up/down). The fourth concept is, of course, shape. Select one student to learn the concept you have chosen but not revealed from the four possibilities. Give the student feedback after each card as to whether his or her response was correct. For instance, you have selected size as the relevant concept. If the student selects a large, blue triangle on the card, tell the student the choice is wrong (since you secretly selected small). See how many cards it takes the student to discover the relevant concept. You may want to repeat this exercise using a different concept for at least two other students.

Conclusion: Discuss how concept formation is an important but often difficult task.

Activity: Mental Imagery The textbook notes that images (i.e., mental representations of a sensory experience) play an important role in thinking and cognition; that is, we commonly visualize things in order to think about and solve problems. Margaret Matlin suggests two simple demonstrations that illustrate how certain attributes of mental images (such as their size and shape) influence our ability to make judgments.

Imagery and size. Read the following questions aloud to your students: Scenario I: Imagine an elephant standing next to a rabbit. Now, answer this question: Does a rabbit have a beak?

Scenario II: Imagine a fly standing next to a rabbit. Now, answer this question: Does a rabbit have an eyebrow?

Next, ask your students to tell you whether the rabbit was the largest in Scenario I or II. Which scenario seemed to have more detail in the area they were examining for the beak or the eyebrow, I or II? According to Matlin, research

by Stephen Kosslyn suggests that the size of an image is an important factor in determining how fast we can make judgments about it. Indeed, across several studies people made faster judgments when relying on a larger mental image (such as the rabbit next to the fly) than when using a smaller mental image (such as the rabbit next to an elephant). Did your students’ experiences mirror this result?

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Instructor’s Resource Manual for Psychology: An Exploration Imagery and shape. For this problem students will need to imagine two standard (non-digital) clocks. Explain that you will present them with two specific times, and that for each pair of times they should compare their mental clocks and decide which clock has the smaller angle between the hour hand and the minute hand. Give students the following times: 1. 3:20 and 7:25 2. 4:10 and 9:23 3. 2:45 and 1:05 4. 3:15 and 5:30 Did some sets seem to take longer than others? If your students took longer with sets 1 and 4 than with 2 and 3, your results are consistent with Allan Paivio’s research, which showed that decision time is related to the size of the difference between angles. That is, it is much harder (and thus, takes longer) to make a decision between angles that are nearly equal (e.g., 3:20 and 7:25) than it is to make a decision between angles that are quite different (e.g., 4:10 and 9:23).

Matlin, M. W. (1994). Cognition (3rd ed.). Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace.

Reprinted from Alan Swinkels (2003). Instructor’s resource manual for Psychology by S. Kassin. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Activity: Problem Representation Challenge your students by presenting them with the hospital room problem (taken from Matlin, 1994). Handout Master 6.2 contains the details of the problem, which can be projected onto an overhead or photocopied and distributed to students. After students have had a reasonable amount of time to solve the problem, have them discuss their representation of it as well as its correct answer. (Answer: Ms. Anderson has mononucleosis and is in Room 104.)

Matlin, M. W. (1994). Cognition (3rd ed.). Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace.

Reprinted from Alan Swinkels (2003). Instructor’s resource manual for Psychology by S. Kassin. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Activity: Insight Insight, the sudden understanding of a problem, is often considered to be a component of intelligence. You can demonstrate the “aha” feeling that insight inspires by presenting students with the problems in Handout Master 6.3, which are taken from the popular game, MindTrap©. Students are likely to exclaim with joy each time they experience the insight necessary to solve a particular problem.

Answers: 1. The letters should be arranged as follows: one word.

2. A desert is a region so arid that it supports little or no vegetation. This includes frozen deserts of the far north, where Abdullah made his crossing. Thus, he survived by eating ice and snow.

3. It is the shortest sentence in the English language that includes every letter of the alphabet.

4. The “pack on her back” was a pack of wild wolves.

5. The two of you must stand back to back.

6. There aren’t any penguins in the Arctic (they are native to the Southern Hemisphere).

MindTrap Games, Inc. (1991). MindTrap. Norwalk, CT: Great American Puzzle Factory.

Activity: Availability Heuristics Objective: To demonstrate the potential shortcoming of availability heuristics Materials: See Handout Master 6.4 Heuristics

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Chapter 6: Consciousness and Cognition Procedure: When people judge the relative frequency of objects or events, they are often influenced by the relative availability or accessibility of such events in their own memories. Distribute the handout and ask the students to indicate their answers to the questions. Their estimates are influenced by the availability heuristic if they indicate that the number of words beginning with r or k is greater than the number of words with those letters appearing third. This is because first letters are more useful cues than third letters for referencing and accessing items in one’s personal word collection. It is easier to generate (i.e., make available) words that begin with the letters. Actually, words with those letters appearing third are far more numerous. Similarly, their estimate of the number of women faculty on campus should be positively correlated with the number of female professors they have actually had.

Activity: Breaking Sets in Problem-Solving Objective: To demonstrate how psychological set (e.g., stating the problem) can interfere with the generation of solutions to problems Materials: See Handout Master 6.5 Procedure: Ask students to think about a problem; the problem may be a corporate problem (e.g., crime or pollution) or a personal problem (e.g., poor grades). Using the handout, each student should reword or describe the problem in several different ways. This may open some doors in terms of solutions. Next, students should develop at least two solutions to the problem.

Activity: Demonstrating Cognitive Biases Cognitive biases are often difficult for students to grasp. The following simple demonstrations will help students recognize such biases in their own thinking.

1.

The availability heuristic is the tendency to judge the frequency of some event as a function of how available specific instances of that event are in memory.

A geographer named Thomas Saarinen provides an interesting variation on the availability heuristic by asking students to draw their “mental maps” of the world. Saarinen asks students to take a pencil and a piece of paper and spend half an hour sketching a map of the world. He finds that there are two consistent patterns in the resulting maps. Students greatly enlarge the size of Europe and reduce the size of Africa. Saarinen finds that this occurs regardless of the country of origin of the students. This undoubtedly reflects the relative prominence of Europe and the relative obscurity of Africa in the Western view of history. That which we know more about is seen as physically larger, and that which we know little of is diminished in size.

This is an easy phenomenon to demonstrate. Before a discussion of cognitive biases, ask students to spend half an hour outside of class drawing a map of the world. Make sure they know that they may not “cheat” by looking at maps, globes, or atlases. It may help to reassure students that you will not grade their maps, and that they may submit them anonymously. Have students turn in the maps at least one class prior to your discussion of the topic, so that you have time to review and summarize the results of the demonstration. See if your students exhibit the same biases that Saarinen reports; you might make overheads of some of the better examples you receive. You might use this demonstration to highlight the influence of culture on cognition, a topic that psychologists are only recently beginning to investigate.

2.

The confirmation bias is the tendency to look for information that confirms one’s belief.

There are many easy ways to demonstrate the confirmation bias. The standard approach is to write a series of three numbers, such as 5, 7, and 9 on the board. Tell students that there is a rule to which these numbers conform, and it is their job to determine what the rule is. To solve the problem, students may give you any sequence of three numbers and you will tell them whether it conforms to the rule. Record their sequences and your responses on the board or transparency.

When they feel confident that they have guessed the rule, they should raise their hands and offer their solution.

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Instructor’s Resource Manual for Psychology: An Exploration

The rule for the above sequence is simply “any three ascending numbers,” but students will develop many more complicated possibilities. The confirmation bias will be demonstrated by the nature of the sequences that students offer to test their guesses. If a student believes that the rule is “three successive odd numbers,” he or she might ask whether “9, 11, 13” conforms to the rule. Additional sequences that they suggest will probably conform to the same rule. But these are confirming instances of their rule, and therefore provide little information. It is much more informative to provide a sequence that they believe is wrong, such as “2, 3, 4,” and discover that it is, in fact, consistent with the rule, thereby allowing them to reject an incorrect guess.

3.

The hindsight bias is the tendency to overestimate one’s ability to have predicted an event once the outcome is known.

To demonstrate this bias, ask students to predict the outcome of an upcoming event (Academy Awards, elections, World Series, etc.). Next to their predictions, ask students to rank their degree of confidence in the prediction on a scale from 1 (“Just a guess, I’m not at all sure.”) to 5 (“I’m very sure!”). Collect the papers, and return them after the outcome of the event. Ask students to reflect on their reactions. Do they feel that “they knew it all along” even though their confidence ratings before the event indicate otherwise?

Monastersky, R. (1992). The warped world of mental maps. Science News, 142, 222–223.

Activity: Creative Thinking (Group Activity) Tell your students that you want them to take out a sheet of paper because there is a quiz. Once all the groaning has stopped, have them write down all the uses they can think of for some item, i.e., Kitty Litter or rice. At the end of 5 minutes have them get into small groups and see how many uses the small groups can come up with for whatever item you have chosen.

Have the students present their cooperative list to the class. Make sure that you tell them they need not repeat an item that another group has already presented. Find out how many items they originally came up with versus the number of items that the group named. It is interesting how many items have similar in the group.

This finding can be a lead in to discussing a mental set and how it impedes creativity.

Activity: Mental Sets in Everyday Life Luchins’ water jar problem and the alphabetical number puzzle are ways to demonstrate how mental sets can create barriers to effective problem solving. After students have been introduced to the notion of mental sets (from the text, lecture, and exercises such as those given in the next section), you might ask them to write a short paper in which they identify instances of mental sets in everyday life. As one example, students could consider the problem of making the adjustment from high school to college. How might a mental set (i.e., the tendency to approach or respond to a problem in a particular way) learned in high school interfere with the successful solution of problems later on in college? Students should specify how strategies that at one time were adaptive or successful could eventually become undesirable or maladaptive. Traditional-age college students should have plenty of experience with mental sets related to academic strategies, social life, living away from home, financial responsibilities, and so on. If your students are older, they might consider mental sets related to major life changes (e.g., marriage, divorce, death of a loved one), career changes, or other situations requiring adjustment on their part. An added benefit of this assignment is that—in addition to better understanding the notion of mental sets—your students might also gain valuable insight into their own problem solving strategies and skills.

Adapted from Zechmeister, E. B., & Johnson, J. E. (1992). Critical thinking: A functional approach. Belmont, CA: Brooks/Cole.

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Chapter 6: Consciousness and Cognition Activity: Creativity Quiz Draw a circle on the board. Allow students five minutes to list all of the things they can think of that your picture could represent. Use a plate and a wedding ring as examples, and urge them to think divergently. Sample responses may include, for example: Total eclipse of the sun / Top view of a baldheaded man / Floor plan for an igloo / Port hole at night / The end of a gun as seen by a victim / Belly button / Bucket of tar from the top Activity: Context and Speech Perception Margaret Matlin points out that human speech perception is quite flexible: We are active listeners who, instead of receiving speech sounds, use context as a cue to help figure out a word or a sound. One implication of this flexibility is phonemic restoration, in which people regularly (and without awareness) fill in missing sounds using context as a cue. Apparently, our skill at reconstructing missing sounds (e.g., hearing the word peel in the sentence, “The _eel was on the orange”) has evolved because we are accustomed to having phonemes occasionally masked by extraneous noises, such as coughs, whispers, pages turning, etc. Interestingly, it is our ability to perceive words on the basis of context that also allows us to ignore sloppy mispronunciations. To demonstrate this in class, practice reading the following sentences until you can read them smoothly. Then, read them aloud to your class, asking students to identify which sound/word in each sentence was incorrect.

1. In all the gunfusion, the mystery man escaped from the mansion.

2. When I was working pizily in the library, the fire alarm rang out.

3. The messemger ran up to the professor and handed her a proclamation.

4. It has been zuggested that students be required to preregister.

5. The president reacted vavorably to all of the committee’s suggestions.

Your students, if consistent with research by Cole, should not notice mispronunciations when they occur in the context of a sentence (although Cole’s subjects were able to distinguish syllables such as gun and con when the isolated syllables were presented). Matlin notes that our tolerance of sloppy speech may cause us to overlook startling pronunciation mistakes made by children, as in the case of the child who sang the following words to a famous Christmas carol, “O come all ye hateful: Joy, Phil, and their trumpet.”

Matlin, M. W. (1994). Cognition (3rd ed.). Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace.

Activity: Non-sexist Language The generic use of man and other masculine pronouns excludes women in our language and also contributes to gender stereotyping. As a thought-provoking assignment, have your students try to generate gender neutral alternatives for the words in Handout Master 6.6 (suggested alternatives are given below). This exercise should not only spark a lively discussion of the importance of gender neutral language, but should also provide students with plausible alternatives that they will then (hopefully) incorporate into their own speech. You might also consider assigning Janet Hyde’s excellent article referenced below.

Some suggested gender neutral alternatives: 1. business people 2. businesswoman 3. cave dwellers, cave people 4. chair, head, president, leader, moderator, coordinator 5. student 6. representatives, members of Congress, Congress people 7. craftsperson, artisan, craft worker Copyright © 2016 Pearson Canada Inc. 305

Instructor’s Resource Manual for Psychology: An Exploration 8. delivery clerk, courier, deliverer 9. ancestors, forebears 10. supervisor, boss, leader, foreperson, head juror 11. laypeople 12. mail carrier, postal worker 13. the human species, humans, humanity, humankind, human beings, people 14. handmade, hand-built, human-made, synthetic, manufactured, constructed 15. personnel, staff, human resources, labour, people power 16. meter reader, meter attendant 17. police officer 18. repairer, repair person 19. salesclerk, salesperson, sales rep (or representative) 20. trash collector Hyde, J. S. (1984). Children’s understanding of sexist language. Developmental Psychology, 20, 697–706.

Swinkels, A., Giuliano, T. A., & Dickson, A. J. (2001). Her inclusion in mankind: A review of research on sexist language. Unpublished manuscript.

Adapted from Miller, C., & Swift, K. (1988). The handbook of nonsexist writing (2nd ed.). New York: Harper & Row. Reprinted from Alan Swinkels (2003). Instructor’s resource manual for Psychology by S. Kassin. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Activity: Channels of Communication Nonverbal behaviour is often taken for granted, probably because it occurs so effortlessly in our interactions that we fail to notice it. It provides such a valuable aspect of communication, however, that it is definitely noticed when it is missing. You can illustrate the importance of nonverbal behaviour to your students with a simple demonstration.

Start by drawing a simple dichotomy between verbal channels of communication and nonverbal channels. The verbal channel is easy; it is the words used, or perhaps a transcript of them. Ask your students to list the nonverbal channels of communication as you write them on the blackboard. The first response will usually be a generic “body language,” but tell them to be more specific; body language is a catch-all term incorporating many nonverbal channels. In short order you should find that students list facial expressions, eye contact, vocal cues (mainly tone of voice), and gestures, and with a little prodding they will add touch, interpersonal distance, speech dysfluencies, posture, gait, or appearance (such as hair or clothing style) as ways of communicating nonverbally. Seeing the board fill up with one verbal means of communication and 5 to 8 nonverbal channels will illustrate clearly the importance of nonverbal behaviour.

After generating these ways of communicating, illustrate what kind of information each adds to a message. This will take some acting on your part, but it is easy to master with a little practice. Start by saying a very emphatic message (“I’m absolutely thrilled to be here today!”) while keeping all other channels of communication constant. In other words, hold your body perfectly still (arms at your side), keep a neutral facial expression, and say the words in a monotone. It should be clear that although the verbal channel is quite enthusiastic, the nonverbal channels belie the impact of the message. Next repeat the message, adding the appropriate vocal inflections and tone cues, but keeping all other channels constant. Add a happy facial expression in the next iteration, and finally repeat the gushing message with inflection, a happy face, and a broad sweep of your arms. Your students will get the idea that words actually “say” very little; most of this message is carried by other channels.

A variation on this idea is suggested by Richmond and McCroskey, focusing on the vocal channel. You can demonstrate this yourself or by enlisting the help of 4 or 5 students willing to ham it up in front of the class.

Consider the following phrases: “Gee, thanks,” “This turned out to be a fine day,” “I just love it when you do that,” “Way to go, dude,” “I would like nothing better,” “Wow, this is fun,” “Wonderful,” “That’s my favourite,” “Truly awesome,” “Real nice,” “This stinks,” and “Rhonda’s a real winner, isn’t she?” Ask your students to say each phrase using a variety of vocal styles, and have the class comment on the change in meaning that results. In each case the most obvious difference will come from the use of sarcasm, where the vocal inflection runs opposite to the verbal content. But many of these phrases (as well as others you might generate that are more specific to your university or Copyright © 2016 Pearson Canada Inc. 306

Chapter 6: Consciousness and Cognition to your class) can carry other meanings as well. For example, “Real nice” can convey sarcasm, sincerity, or sexuality depending on how it is delivered. Like the facial expression demonstration described earlier, these are fun and easy ways to introduce the topic of nonverbal behaviour.

Richmond, V. P., & McCroskey, J. C. (1995). Nonverbal behavior in interpersonal relations (3rd ed.). Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon.

Activity: Do Animals Have Language? A Survey A fairly large number of people believe that animals have language abilities. Most scientific data on the point, however, indicate that animals communicate, but do not use a complicated system of symbols and syntax to convey ideas. The following three questions can be used by students as an informal survey of people (including fellow students, parents, etc.) regarding the issue of animal language: 1) Do you believe that animals have language? a. If so, what specific species?

2) Why or why not?

3) Why do you think humans have such well-developed language abilities?

Students can potentially learn a great deal by teaching those that they survey (presumably there will be many people who may not grasp the vast difference between animal communication and human language). Additionally, the answers to #3 may be interesting, enlightening, and even humorous.

Activity: Exploring Bilingualism Although many educators believe that bilingual children should be taught in English and in their native language (both to preserve their culture and because it has cognitive benefits), other educators and members of Congress are pushing to assimilate non-native speakers into U.S. culture by placing them in classes where only English is taught.

Because much of the negativity and confusion about this issue may stem from a general fear and dislike for the unknown, your students might gain a fresh perspective on this controversial issue by considering what it’s like to be bilingual or multilingual. For this assignment, ask your students to write a short paper that explores the experiences of being bilingual or multilingual; Margaret Matlin (1994) suggests several excellent questions that can be used as the cornerstone for such an essay. If any of your students are bilingual or multilingual, they can answer some of these questions themselves. Otherwise, students should identify someone they know fairly well who they would feel comfortable asking about their experiences. Questions to be addressed include: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

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How old were you when you were first exposed to your second language?

How did you acquire this second language (e.g., Did you have formal lessons? Were you taught by a parent?)

When you began to learn the second language, did you find yourself becoming less fluent in your native language? What kinds of problems did you experience? Can you give examples?

What do you think are the advantages of being bilingual? For example, do you think you have any insight into the nature of language that a monolingual person might not have?

When you are with another bilingual person who speaks your native language, do you find yourself switching back and forth between the two languages? Are there situations in which you are especially likely to switch from one language to the other?

If you had something embarrassing or secret to divulge, in which language would you discuss it?

Are there any topics or kinds of conversation for which you prefer one language over the other? For example, are there aspects of your education or job that, because they were derived from American terminology (e.g., psychological concepts), are harder to discuss in your native language? Is it difficult to express American cultural concepts in your native language?

Do you feel that the North American culture discourages bilinguals from using their first language?

Matlin, M. W. (1994). Cognition (3rd ed.). Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace.

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The sentences presented contain words that are spelled identically, but have different pronunciations and meanings (these kinds of words are called homographs). This leads to potentially ambiguous reading of the sentences!

However, most readers of English are extremely adept at reading the sentences, probably due to the context in which the words are used. In any case, students can use these 12 sentences as a sort of survey to be conducted on their fellow students. The idea is to have the subjects read each sentence aloud and determine whether any errors (even pauses could be interpreted as errors) occur. Each sentence should be presented individually, so as not to allow subject to “preread” the sentences. Additionally, subjects should attempt to read a sentence immediately after being presented with it. Total errors made should be tallied. If the homographs were indeed completely ambiguous, then we would expect errors in pronunciation for every sentence (a total of 12 errors). Most subjects will probably not exhibit this kind of error rate! A list of all homographs in the English language can be found at this website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_homographs 1) The bandage was wound around the wound.

2) The farm was used to produce produce.

3) The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.

4) We must polish the Polish furniture.

5) When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.

6) I did not object to the object.

7) They were too close to the door to close it.

8) The buck does funny things when the does are present.

9) To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.

10) After a number of Novocain injections, my jaw got number.

11) Upon seeing the tear in the painting I shed a tear.

12) I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.

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Activity: Crossword Puzzle Frequently instructors want an activity that is interactive for their students as well as a reinforcer of the material just covered in the lecture. An activity such as a crossword puzzle can fulfill both criteria. Copy and distribute Handout Master 6.7 to students as a homework or in-class review assignment.

Across 2. cycle of bodily rhythm occurring over a 24-hour period. Circadian rhythm 4. sleepwalking. Somnambulism 6. the most general form of a type or concept. Superordinate 9. long slow waves indicating the deepest stage of sleep. Delta 10. disorder in which the person stops breathing for nearly half a minute or more. Sleep apnea 11. thinking or mental activity that goes on in the brain when a person is attempting to understand, organize, or communicate information. Cognition 13. concepts defined by specific rules of features. Formal 17. system of rules for combining words and phrases to form grammatically correct sentences. Syntax 22. specific, step-by-step procedure for solving certain types of problems. Algorithm 24. smallest units of meaning in a language. Morphemes Down 1. a person’s awareness of everything that is going on around him or her at any given moment. Consciousness 3. increased amounts of REM sleep after deprivation in earlier nights REM rebound 5. educated guess based on prior experiences; rule of thumb. Heuristic 7. brain waves indicating the early stages of sleep. Theta 8. sleep disorder in which a person falls immediately into REM sleep during the day without warning. Narcolepsy 12. concepts defined by the result of experiences in the real world. Natural 14. stage of sleep in which the person is typically experiencing a dream. REM 15. ideas that represent a class or category of objects, events, or activities. Concepts 16. basic units of sound in language. Phonemes 18. brain waves that indicate relaxation or light sleep. Alpha 19. thinking in which a person starts from one point and comes up with different ideas or possibilities. Divergent 20. state of consciousness in which there is a shift in the quality or pattern of mental activity. Altered state 21. the example of a concept that closely matches a concept’s defining characteristics. Prototype 23. inability to get to sleep, stay asleep, or get good quality sleep. Insomnia

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Activity: Fill in the Blank Copy and distribute Handout Master 6.8 to students as a homework or in-class review assignment.

Answer Key: Chapter 6 Consciousness and Cognition -- Fill-in-the-Blanks 1.

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6.

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12.

13.

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Consciousness altered state circadian rhythm Alpha waves Rapid eye movement REM paralysis Sleepwalking (somnambulism) Night terrors Insomnia Sleep apnea Narcolepsy subordinate representative Functional fixedness Convergent Grammar Pragmatics

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HANDOUT MASTERS 6.1 Recording the Stream of Consciouness 6.2 The Hospital Room Problem 6.3 Insight 6.4 Availability Heuristics 6.5 Breaking Sets in Problem-Solving 6.6 Using Non-Sexist Language 6.7 Crossword Puzzle 6.8 Fill-in-the Blank Exercise

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Handout Master 6.1 Recording the Stream of Consciousness Instructions: During class, the lecture will be interrupted at four random intervals. Whenever the instructor says “stop and record your thoughts,” you should immediately write down in the spaces provided below exactly what you were thinking about just before the interruption. Please write down exactly what you were thinking (i.e., do not edit yourself); anything is acceptable as long as it is accurate. These data will not be collected by the instructor.

Interruption 1:

Interruption 2:

Interruption 3:

Interruption 4:

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Handout Master 6.2 The Hospital Room Problem Instructions: Use the following information to answer the question posed below.

Five people are in a hospital. Each one has only one disease, and each has a different disease. Each one occupies a separate room; room numbers are 101–105.

1. The person with asthma is in Room 101.

2. Ms. Jones has heart disease.

3. Ms. Green is in Room 105.

4. Ms. Smith has tuberculosis.

5. The woman with mononucleosis is in Room 104.

6. Ms. Thomas is in Room 101.

7. One of the patients, other than Ms. Anderson, has gall bladder disease.

Question: What disease does Ms. Anderson have and in what room is she?

Source: Matlin, M. W. (1994). Cognition (3rd ed.). Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace.

Reprinted from Alan Swinkels (2003). Instructor’s resource manual for Psychology by S. Kassin. Upper Saddle River, NJ, Pearson Education, Inc.

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Handout Master 6.3 Insight Instructions: Give the correct answer for each of the following problems.

1. How would you rearrange the letters in the words new door to make one word? [Note: There is only one correct answer.]

2. It is impossible for anyone to survive longer than one week without drinking, yet Abdullah managed a ten-day desert crossing without finding water or bringing any along. How was this possible?

3. What is so unusual about the sentence below? (Aside from the fact that it doesn’t make a lot of sense.)

“Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz.”

4. A well-known fashion designer, wanting to escape the hustle and bustle of the city, decided to spend a few days at a rural resort. After a day of relaxing, she went for a winter stroll to get some fresh air. That was the last time anyone saw her alive. The autopsy revealed that her death was due to the pack on her back. What was so deadly about this pack?

5. How can you stand behind your father while he is standing behind you?

6. Even if they are starving, natives living in the Arctic will never eat a penguin’s egg. Why not?

Source: MindTrap Games, Inc. (1991). MindTrap. Norwalk, CT: Great American Puzzle Factory.

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Chapter 6: Consciousness and Cognition Handout Master 6.4 Availability Heuristics

Heuristics 1.

In the English language, are there more words beginning with the letter r or more words with the letter r appearing as the third letter?  First position  Third position

2.

In the English language, are there more words beginning with the letter k or more words with the letter k appearing as the third letter?  First position  Third position

3.

What percentage of the faculty at this university are women? ________ %

4.

How many of your courses have been taught by female professors? ________ courses

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Instructor’s Resource Manual for Psychology: An Exploration Handout Master 6.5 Breaking Sets in Problem-Solving

Think of a problem. Describe it concisely, then list four alternative ways to describe the difficulty.

Initial statement of the problem:

Alternate 1:

Alternate 2:

Alternate 3:

Alternate 4:

Describe the problem from the point of view of other parties involved:

Describe two solutions to this problem, indicating how these solutions are influenced by the particular statement of the problem you have chosen:

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Chapter 6: Consciousness and Cognition Handout Master 6.6 Using Nonsexist Language Instructions: For each of the following words or phrases below, try to generate at least one alternative word or phrase that is gender neutral. For example, firefighter is an appropriate gender neutral alternative for fireman, and anchor is a suitable substitute for anchorman.

1. businessman

___________________________

2. career girl

____________________________

3. cavemen

___________________________

4. chairman, chairwoman

___________________________

5. coed (as in, “three beautiful coeds”)

___________________________

6. congressmen

___________________________

7. craftsman

___________________________

8. deliveryman

___________________________

9. forefathers

___________________________

10. forelady, foreman

___________________________

11. laymen

___________________________

12. mailman

___________________________

13. man, mankind (as in the human species)

___________________________

14. man-made

___________________________

15. manpower

___________________________

16. meter maid

___________________________

17. policeman, policewoman

___________________________

18. repairman

___________________________

19. salesman, saleswoman

___________________________

20. trashman

___________________________

Adapted from Miller, C., & Swift, K. (1988). The handbook of nonsexist writing (2nd ed.). New York: Harper & Row.

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Instructor’s Resource Manual for Psychology: An Exploration Handout Master 6.7 Crossword Puzzle Activity

Chapter 6: Consciousness and Cognition

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