Unit+7+-+Cognition



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"The Boy With the Incredible Brain" - Daniel Tammet
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Stephen Wiltshire - "the Human Camera"
Mr. Wiltshire is an autistic savant who has an amazing ability for visual memory and artistic skill. As seen in the video below, he has demonstrated an ability to remember what an entire city looks like and draw it in almost perfect detail from memory. Here you see him fly over Rome (a city he had never seen before) and then draw from memory to near perfection. Absolutely amazing. media type="custom" key="24532312"

If you find this interesting, there are a lot of other videos out there about Stephen, so feel free to search for them. If you're interested in his art, the website for his gallery is at []. Don't worry, his original artwork seems to be quite affordable, ranging from about a mere $10,000 to $30,000.

**American Dialects**
Is it "pop," "soda," or "Coke"? Is it a "sub" or a "hoagie"? A "water fountain" or a "bubbler"? This is an article from 2003 that looks at the regional variation in language throughout the United States.

**"Crossing the River"**
The classic brain teaser in interactive form to practice your problem solving skills. Can you get all three missionaries and all three cannibals across the river (without anyone being eaten)? Or if that link isn't working for you, try this one:[]

=== Frog Leap Game === Click the link to try out the problem solving game we tried in class.

=== __Brain Teasers__ === A site with 61 different quick brain teasers for those of you that like that problem solving kind of stuff...

Words & Thought[[image:http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Kb6LuacJg-U/TL74b7VI0sI/AAAAAAAADd0/DkKjv4EsMso/s320/words2_.jpg align="right" link="@http://www.radiolab.org/2010/aug/09/"]]
How much does our language impact our thinking? This is a fascinating topic that we unfortunately only briefly address in AP Psychology. However, I encourage you to use some of these sources to investigate the topic a little further. This NY Times article provides a good overview of the issues, includes the ups and downs of Whorf's linguistic relativity hypothesis.

Probably even more interesting is this podcast from NPR's Radiolab program about words and their role in our lives and thinking. The program includes a lot of interesting ideas, including: 1) a teacher's breakthrough with a deaf adult who grew up with no language 2) a neurologist's story about her brain injury that left her without any language or "brain chatter" 3) a summary of a longitudinal research project with an isolated group of deaf children in Nicaragua who developed their own language while researchers watched!

NOVA (PBS) - "Secrets of the Wild Child" (Genie)
For any of you who wanted to watch the rest of the video we started in class about Genie, here it is for your viewing pleasure. I suggest you watch the rest if you have time, it is certainly an interesting case that has implications for more than one area of psychology. media type="custom" key="24532498" media type="custom" key="24532504" media type="custom" key="24532520" media type="custom" key="24532526" media type="custom" key="24532536" media type="custom" key="24532548"

__**Primate Language videos**__
The video from class for "The Mind: Episode 27, Animal Language" can be viewed by following the link below: [] media type="custom" key="24532620" media type="custom" key="24532630"

__The Stroop Effect__
This is a classic psychological test that many of you may have seen before. It has implications for a number of different units including this one. In part, it demonstrates the difficulties of divided attention and interference as well as other phenomena. Typically you have experienced that knowing, understanding, and reciting the word and its meaning is more important than the color of the ink. However, suddenly you have to approach reading in an entirely different fashion, which you likely find very difficult to do. media type="custom" key="24532648"

Here are some other sites where you can test out and learn about the Stroop Effect!

== Stroop Test 1 ==

== Stroop Test 2 ==

__MacGyver - the king of overcoming functional fixedness! :)__
I know that you guys are a bit too young to remember this show, but this is classic tv cheeziness for my generation. In a desperate situation, MacGyver could somehow find a way to make a bomb out of a piece of chewing gum, a toothpick, and a paperclip. As long as you overlook the fact that most of this wouldn't actually work in real life... it's a fun example of the reverse of functional fixedness. media type="custom" key="24532668" media type="custom" key="24532674" media type="custom" key="24532686"