Blog number 2

Something that I have found really interesting in this and other cognitive based classes, is different types of cognitive errors. How people, from infancy to adulthood, make consistent, predictable errors. Some of these errors make sense, and some adult errors you can see primitive versions of in infancy. I think that is fascinating. For example, the paper by Feigenson, Carey and Hauser about infant’s representations or more, I think really shows an elementary version of range of difficulty in adult representation of more. I am referring mostly to the fact that infants have an understanding that 2 is more than 1 and 3 is more than 2, but have trouble differentiating larger numbers, even with the same ratio and even after they accounted for other possible interactions, like motivation. I think that adults show a much more advanced version of this difficulty distinguishing differences, the more items there are, though I would guess adults would do better with ratios than infants do. It is just interesting to look at the evolution of perception, and how some things seem innate, and some things that intuitively seem simple can be more challenging than one might think, brain wiring plays a bigger role than I think people realize. This reminds me a lot of things I learned in cognition, for example, how people miss-judg steepness of a hill, especially when they think they are going to have to walk up it…I know that this is different, but I just find cognitive misjudgment to be really interesting.
Something else I have always found really interesting, that we have touched on a few times in class is brain plasticity. The brains abilities are incredible to me. To me, the best demonstration of this is how the brain processes language. First of all language is obviously extremely important evolutionarily speaking. Communication is vital to existence. So, it makes sense that the brain would spread out different components of language throughout the brain. The obvious example, seen in most psych classes, is Broca’s area versus Wernicke’s area. Broca’s area, is responsible for word production and Wernicke’s area, is responsible for language comprehension. This spreading out is important because, if there is a stroke in one area the other areas of communication may still be intact. And plasticity comes into play if that stroke is in younger kids, who can that use their more plastic brain’s to delegate space differently and possibly recover some abilities that the more cemented adult brain can’t.
This leads into the idea of a critical period. This is something that I have always found really interesting. I have wondered before why, if learning a first language is so smooth and intuitive, is it so hard to learn a second language? Admittedly, I always did really badly in second language classes, but I still wondered why it was so different. Obviously the process of learning a second language is very different because you are typically not emerged in it the same as when you learn a first language, but even when you do, if you learn a second language late, you never have the same connection to it. My best friends mom is a good example of this. She speaks only English, none of her kids know her native language and she has lived in an English speaking country most of her life, but she still speaks broken English, and holds on the grammatical and syntactical rules of her first language. And, people from the who share her first language, will make the same errors. I think this is even true for sounds, which is also really interesting, and happens really young. We loose the ability to differentiate between phonemes that don’t exist in our language, but seem completely different to people who natively speaks languages where they do exist. In class the other day we couldn’t even pick out an individual word spoken in a different language. It is incredible to me how our brain molds to our environment and looses certain things, like culturally irrelevant phonemes, probably in order for the rest of the brain to run more efficiently. And we completely loose these things. We cannot completely learn a language past a certain critical period (probably), and we will never really understand those different phonemes the way speakers of other languages do.