BA II Sem IV Psychology

THINKING: NATURE, TOOL & TYPES AND FACTORS

THINKING

Thinking is the most complex of all psychological processes and it is thinking, which differentiates
man from lower animals. Though experiments indicate the animals can also think, thinking being a
cognitive and symbolic process, requires the function of higher intelligence.

Thinking helps in solving a problem, in fulfilling a need or motivation. Ruch (1970) observed that
thinking is always directed towards preparation for action, towards producing new meanings,
towards producing beliefs and towards attending enjoyments. You want to attend a famous opera.
But you don’t have the money. So you try to explore mentally how to get $ 500/- for the ticket.
Instead of going here and there and search for money physically, you sit and plan what to do, how to
get the money. After the plan is made, you start your course of action.

You are an architect, you have prepared the design of an eighteen storey hotel. You take a piece of
paper and make drawing representing the design of the building. You try one way, it is not
acceptable to you, so you make another plan. In this manner you go on changing your plan until it is
able to represent your thinking. You want to renovate the interior decoration of your drawing room.
Instead of going physically to the drawing room and keeping things here and there and observing the
effect, you with the help of images, ideas and symbols make a plan in your mind’s eye, how to
decorate the drawing room, where to keep different things and so on. If one set of ideas do not suit
you, you start thinking of another set of ideas. All these plannings and modifications are done in the
mental level. The graphic and verbal symbols are mentally manipulated in order to solve a problem,
plan a building or decorate a drawing room.

Thinking is, therefore, called “mental trial and error”. The motor activities are minimum in thinking.
In the process of thinking the trial and error goes on in the mental level. That is why Woodworth has
conceptualized thinking as mental exploration. Some other definitions are:

1. Morgan, King, Weisz, and Schopler (1986):”Thinking consists of the cognitive rearrangement or
manipulation of both information from the environment and the symbols stored in Long term
Memory”.

2. Galotti(1989): “Going beyond the information given” is thinking.

3. Feldman (1996): “Thinking is the manipulation of mental representations of information”.

4. Baron (2001): Thinking is an “activity that involves the manipulation of mental representations
of various features of the external world”.
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Characteristics of thinking

TOOLS/ Elements/ Components of thinking:

Concepts, Propositions, Images and Language

1. Concepts are basic units of thought or categories with common properties. Concepts are
mental categories for objects, events, experiences or ideas that are similar to one another in one
or more respects.

Concepts are closely related to schemas – cognitive frameworks that represent our knowledge of
and assumptions about the world. Schemas are generalizations about categories of objects,
events, and people. Example: Jack’s schema for books is that they are a bound stack of paper
with stories or other information written on each page. When his fifth-grade teacher suggests that
each student read a book on the computer, he is confused until he sees that the same information
could be presented on a computer screen. Jack has now revised his schema for books to include
those presented through electronic media.

Concepts are mental categories for objects, events, experiences or ideas that are similar to one
another in one or more respects. Concepts play a central role in our task of understanding the world
around us, and representing it mentally. Concepts allow us to represent a lot of information about
inverse objects, events, or ideas in a highly efficient manner.

The following are key elements necessary in defining a concept:

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 Names: term given to a particular group;

 Examples: instances of the concept;
 Attributes: characteristics of the objects;
 Attribute Values and Rules (Critical Attributes): referring to the range within which a
characteristic exemplifies the concept.

Classification of Concepts

1. Classical Artificial/ Formal Concepts: Are ones that can be clearly defined by a set of rules or
properties. Thus, a tomato is a fruit because it possesses the properties established by botanists
for this category. Similarly, as you learned in geometry, a figure can be considered to be a
triangle only if it has three sides whose angles add to 180 degrees, and can be a square only if all
four sides are of equal length and all four angles are ninety degrees. Such artificial concepts are
very useful in many areas of mathematics and science.

2. Natural concepts are ones that have no fixed and readily specified set of defining features. They
are fuzzy around the edges. Yet they more accurately reflect the state of the natural world, which
rarely offers us the luxury of hard-and-fast, clearly defined concepts. For example, consider the
following questions.
a. Is chess a sport?
b. Is a pickle a vegetable?
c. Is a psychologist a scientist?
d. Is someone, who helps a terminally ill person commit suicide, a murderer?

3. A concept may be concrete (a business letter), abstract (productivity), or graphic (information

processing cycle).

4. Conjunctive concept. It refers to a class of objects having more than one feature in common.
Sometimes called "and" concepts: To belong to the concept class, an item must have "This
feature and this feature and this feature." For example, a motorcycle must have two wheels and
an engine and handle bars.

5. Relational concepts. They classify objects on the basis of their relationship to something else or
by the relationship between features of an object. Larger, above, left, north, and upside down are
all relational concepts. Another example is sister, which is defined as "a female considered in her
relation to another person having the same parents."

6. Disjunctive concepts. These refer to objects that have at least one of several possible features.
These are "either-or concepts." To belong, an item must have "this feature or that feature or
another feature." In the game of baseball, a strike is either a swing and a miss or a pitch down the
middle or a foul ball. The either-or quality of disjunctive concepts makes them difficult to learn.

7. Prototypes. In addition to rules and features, most people also use prototypes, or ideal models, to
identify concepts. A robin, for instance, is a model bird, whereas an ostrich is not. What this tells
us is that not all examples of a concept are equally representative. How do we know when the
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line is crossed from tall cup to vase? Probably we mentally compare objects to an "ideal" cup.
The upshot is that identifying concepts is difficult when we cannot come up with a prototype
relevant to what we see.

8. Exemplar: Concepts are defined by its set of members. Concept is represented by multiple
examples (rather than a single prototype). Examples are actual category members (not abstract
averages)

The Functions and Purpose of Concepts

We use concepts for different purposes:

1. For generalizing information. We use concepts to generalize from membership patterns and
relationships. To illustrate, suppose we don't have a concept for ball pens. Every time we see
one, we would go through a lot of effort to know how it works, how to use it, and what it is
for, similar to a baby seeing a ball pen for the first time.
2. For making associations and discriminations. Some concepts are sub-concepts of a more
general concept. For example, the general concept of a book has sub-concepts for novels,
textbooks, dictionaries, etc. These sub-concepts are associated with each other in terms of the
general concept of "book", but they are discriminated to different sub-concepts in such a way
that you can distinguish them from each other.
3. For speeding up memory. Suppose you're reading a fiction novel titled "All About Jamie".
In the first paragraph, the author describes what Jamie looks like. Despite mentioning Jamie's
name only once, and further using "she" to refer to her, you know that the paragraph is about
Jamie because you have a concept of what pronouns are and how they are being used in a
text.
4. For guiding actions and behaviors. Your concept of food tells you what to eat; your
concept of chair tells you where to sit; and, your concept of bed tells you where to sleep.
Imagine if you don't have concepts for each of those; you would eat just about anything, and
sit and sleep just about anywhere. An infant is an example of someone who has undeveloped
concepts of food, chair, and bed.

CONCEPT FORMATION

Concepts are mental categories used to group objects, events, information, etc. For example, despite
the various available designs, brands, and unique structures of chairs, you know a chair when you see
one. That is because you have a concept of what a chair is. Another example is the concept of
clothes. Clothes may be in the form of a dress, a shirt, jeans, shorts, etc., and may be worn by
different people, even by animals and toys. Despite these variations, you can easily identify which of
the things you see around you are clothes and which are chairs. That is because you have clear
concepts of what chairs and what clothes are supposed to be.
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Concept attainment focuses on learning or understanding what characteristics may be useful for
distinguishing between members and non-members of a grouping or class. There are many different
views about how concepts are formed, what information people have when they have mastered a
concept, and how information about new items is related to previously learned concepts.

1. The Classical View. Concepts are learnt according to its defining properties (classical model)-
The classical model clearly defines a triangle as a geometric shape with three sides and 180
degrees interior angles. The classical view of concepts is based on the idea that concepts are
defined by lists of rules. Each concept is believed to be defined by a list of relevant rules or
characteristics, all of which are necessary for the object or instance to be a member of that
category or class. All of the rules taken together that govern a category are sufficient to make
something identifiable as a member of that category or class. In the 1970s a series of studies was
done, many by Eleanor Rosch that demonstrated that people did not hold lists of attributes when
deciding category membership. Instead, she found that individuals had a mental picture or belief
about what made up an example of a member of a class, not a list of well-defined rules (Rosch &
Mervis 1975).

2. The prototype model, defines a concept according to the general characteristics of its members.
The prototype model is particularly useful when not all the members share the same
characteristics, only similar ones. The prototype idea of concept learning was built on the
research done by Rosch and her colleagues (1975). Central to this idea is the concept of a
prototype that exists as the ideal example of each category or class for which a concept has been
learned. A prototype is an object or item that is the most typical of that concept. o determine
category membership or non-membership of novel items, each new item is compared with the
prototype and the degree of similarity reviewed. Proponents of the prototype theory also often
believe that information about examples are organized as being more or less similar to the
prototype. Studies found that participants responded faster to questions about category
membership when the item in question was a more typical member of the category than when it
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was not (McCloskey & Glucksberg, 1979). For example, participants would have responded
more quickly to the question, “Is an oak a tree?” than to the question, “Is a bonsai a tree?”
Although the developing evidence supported the prototype theory much more strongly than the
classical theory, some problems with prototype theory became apparent.

Natural concepts are often based on prototypes – the best or clearest examples (Rosch, 1975),
Prototypes emerge from our experience with the external world, and new items that might
potentially fit with their category are then compared with them. The more attributes such items
share with an existing prototype, the more likely they are to be included within a concept.

3. Exemplar Theory. The exemplar theory of concept learning states that specific examples of
concepts are learned, instead of a generalized or prototypical example or a list of specific
required characteristics. Proponents of this view believe that although not every example that an
individual comes across is stored in the memory, many examples are retained. In this way novel
items or circumstances can be compared to examples that are stored in the memory. Novel items
that are not similar to any of the stored exemplars are therefore very difficult for people to put
into any specific category. Some people believe that the more typical of a category a specific
example is, the more likely it is to be stored as an exemplar of that category.

The exemplar view explains many of the results found during research on concept learning and
categorization. As discussed above, participants tend to respond more quickly when asked about
the category membership of items that are typical of the category in question. This is because
these items are more likely to be stored exemplars or more similar to stored exemplars. The
exemplar theory also has problems explaining some things. It is not clear how many exemplars
are stored or how the determination of storage is made. Another objection frequently raised is
that it requires that individuals store many different exemplars for each concept, taking up vast
quantities of long-term memory, more so than a single prototype would require.
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2. Propositions are the smallest units of knowledge that can stand as separate assertions.
Propositions are relationships between concepts or between a concept and a property of the
concept. Propositions can be true or false. (see Propositions) Example: Carla (concept) likes to
buy flowers (concept) is a proposition that shows a relationship between two concepts. Dogs bark
is a proposition that shows a relationship between a concept (dog) and a property of that concept
(bark).

3. Images: Image are visual pictures represented in thought. Cognitive maps are one example.
Mental imagery can be defined as pictures in the mind or a visual representation in the absence of
environmental input. Mental images also serve important purposes in thinking. People report
using them for understanding verbal instructions – by converting the words into mental pictures
of actions; for increasing motivation – by imagining successful performance; and for enhancing
their own moods – by visualizing positive events or scenes (Kosslyn et al, 1989). Clearly, then,
they constitute another basic element of thinking. Very often, however, mental images also
depend on the kind of concept we possess regarding the stimulus.
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4. LANGUAGE

THE PROPERTIES OF LANGUAGE

Language is a communication system whereby people are able to transmit ideas by means of sounds.
Language is a communication system distinguished by certain features

a) Vocabulary and Semantics

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b) Grammar

The way words are combined into phrases and sentences. In addition to having lots of words to
express our thoughts, , we also know the rules of sequencing which allow us to expres ideas in an
order understood by others. E.g. We can combine words in many ifferent legitimate ways and yet
express a single thought. Thus the statement “Joan saw the bear open the refrigerator and eat
strawberries” may be expresses at “The bear who ate the strawberries opened the refrigerator roon
and was seen by Joan”

Components of grammar: