(BQ) Part 2 book "Introduction to psychology" has contents: Cognitive processes, motivation and emotion, psychological testing and individual differences, personality principles, abnormal personality patterns, therapies, social psychology. | CHAPTER 9 Cognitive Processes Once psychologists gained some knowledge about the processes of acquisition and retention in learning (see Chapters 7 and 8), a number of them turned to consideration of the uses of learning. Ultimately, these studies have focused on the ‘‘things that go on in the head,’’ the mental content and activity called cognitive processes. This chapter concentrates on four major aspects of cognitive processes: conceptual thinking, problem solving, decision making, and the development and use of language. CONCEPTUAL THINKING The contents of memory, as described in Chapter 8, provide the bases on which conceptual thinking is formed. Thinking is symbolic mediation, or the use of symbols to span the time interval between presentation of a stimulus and the responses made to it. Thinking is an internal, personal process that often is attributed to the activity of the mind. The mental manipulation of the representation of information, thinking cannot be observed directly but must be assumed from observable behaviors. EXAMPLE . One college instructor is known to demonstrate the individuality and ‘‘hiddenness’’ of thinking by asking the class to ‘‘think of the dirtiest word you can!’’ The instructor then points out that unless one of the students calls out a word, there is no way for any member of the class to know what choice another student made. However, one of the students could speak, write, or gesture in a way that would indicate his or her thought. The other students could interpret this as representative of that student’s thinking. Symbols. A symbol is any stimulus that has become a commonly accepted representation of an object, event, action, or idea. A symbol may take any form or meaning as long as there is general agreement that it stands for another particular thing. Concepts. Concepts are symbols that summarize or generalize attributes typical of several objects, events, actions, or ideas that are dissimilar in other important .
