Conversational Postulates are requests for action or information masquerading as yes or no questions. It is a question which, on the face of it, requires a Yes or No answer, but which is really demanding a specific behavior. ‘Could you pass me the cream?’ is a request for action, not an inquiry about ability. ‘Do you […]
Monthly Archives: March 2014
Consciousness
Consciousness is the quality or state of being aware of an external object or something within oneself. It has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind.
Transformational Grammar
In linguistics, a transformational grammar or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is a generative grammar, especially of a natural language, that has been developed in the syntactic structures of phrase structure grammars (as opposed to dependency grammars). Transformational grammar is the tradition of specific transformational grammars. Much current research in transformational grammar is inspired by Chomsky’s Minimalist […]
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. There are broadly three aspects to the study, which include language form, language meaning, and language in context. Language can be understood as an interplay of sound and meaning. The discipline that studies linguistic sound is termed as phonetics, which is concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds and non-speech […]
Mnemonic
A mnemonic, or mnemonic device, is any learning technique that aids information retention. Mnemonics aim to translate information into a form that the brain can retain better than its original form. Even the process of merely learning this conversion might already aid in the transfer of information to long-term memory. Commonly encountered mnemonics are often […]
Metamemory (Meta-Memory)
Metamemory, a type of metacognition, is both the introspective knowledge of one’s own memory capabilities (and strategies that can aid memory) and the processes involved in memory self-monitoring. This self-awareness of memory has important implications for how people learn and use memories. When studying, for example, students make judgements of whether they have successfully learned the […]
Cognition
Cognition is the process by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used. In science, cognition is the mental processing that includes the attention of working memory, comprehending and producing language, calculating, reasoning, problem solving, and decision making. Various disciplines, such as psychology, philosophy and linguistics all study cognition. However, the term’s […]
Metacognition (Meta-Cognition)
Meta-Cognition is defined as “cognition about cognition”, or “knowing about knowing” — having a skill, and the knowledge about it to explain how you do it. Metacognition comes from the root word “meta”, meaning behind. It can take many forms; it includes knowledge about when and how to use particular strategies for learning or for problem solving. There […]
Dunning–Kruger Effect
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude. Actual competence may weaken self-confidence, as competent individuals may falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. […]
Cause & Effect
Cause & Effect implies that one thing leads to or causes another; that there is sequence of cause and effect and a flow in time. It includes phrases such as: “If …, then …; As you …., then you …; Because … then …” “If you can hear my voice, then you can learn many […]