Week 9 — Cognition, Language & Intelligence

Welcome to your Week 9 Start Here page.

Why this matters

A nurse double-checking a quick first impression and a marketer choosing between two wordings on a food label both rely on how people think and judge.

In plain language

Your mind makes hundreds of quick calls every day, like which line to stand in or whether a headline is worth worrying about. Cognition is the word psychologists use for this mental work of knowing: sorting things into groups, judging, solving problems, and using language. This week you will see how your mind takes shortcuts, called heuristics, the fast rules of thumb that usually work and sometimes lead you astray in predictable ways. You will also see how language is built from small sounds and meaning units. Finally, you will learn what an IQ, which is a score from a standardized intelligence test, can and cannot tell you about a person.

• Already covered: Weeks 1 to 7 built the science, the brain, sensing, learning, and memory; Week 8 reviewed it all.
• This week: how you think, judge, solve problems, use language, and how intelligence is measured.
• How they connect: the availability heuristic leans on Week 7's retrieval.
• Where we're going next: Week 10, Motivation & Emotion, asks what moves you to act.

Focus

How does your mind make fast judgments, and when does speed cost accuracy?

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

• [ ] tell algorithms from heuristics, and availability from representativeness
• [ ] spot confirmation bias, framing, overconfidence, and three ways to get stuck
• [ ] break a word into morphemes and order the stages of early language
• [ ] compare three views of intelligence and read the IQ scale

To-do

Plan your week

1. Read Chapter 9 (about 45 minutes), then the lecture and the slides.
2. Work the lecture tutorial (60–90 minutes) and the practice set (about 20 minutes).
3. Do the Analysis Workshop (about 90 minutes), the discussion, and the assignment.
4. Take the quiz.

This week's checkpoint: say whether "she must be a librarian" is availability or representativeness, and why.

You've got this

Take it in order, and ask your instructor early if a step snags.

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