The diversity of psychology All speech-language pathologists, as part of their speech therapy education, study psychology. Since psychology is concerned with the full range of what makes us human, it is not surprising that the scope of the discipline is extensive. It has diverse roots – in…
The auditory system is good at attending to sounds. We are able to move our listening attention to focus on just the desired sound.
One of the ways we organize our thoughts is by putting them into categories. This process of developing categories is called concept formation.
Eavesdropping on an unattended message (such as in the ‘cocktail party effect’) is achieved by the brain processing sufficient information in parallel to activate so-called semantic memories.
It would be surprising if the meaning of our utterances turned out not to derive, in part at least, from the thoughts and other mental states that these utterances express. Were that so, language would be failing in one of its main functions. The computational theory…
Modularity and connectionism Cognitive psychology has a long history of invoking the concept of modularity to explain various mental functions. In sum, this concept assumes that the separate components of a modular system are autonomous, i.e. they will remain “functionally intact when other components of the same…
Question What did Piaget mean by ‘action’? My Response The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980) is renowned for his theory of cognitive development. In sum, Piaget considered that the developing child is not able to carry out certain tasks until he or she is…
Representational thinking is the ability to think in analogies, to understand symbols and to infer meanings. It is suggested that as the brain evolved, increasing in size, this triggered a software-hardware self-feeding spiral. After humans developed the ability to infer meaning from others’ actions language was added-on to create an…
