Cognition is the act or process of obtaining knowledge, including perceiving, recognizing, reasoning, and judging. Everyone is different in the way they understanding things. Not everyone understands everything in the same way. Depending upon the way a person grew up, influences the way people acquire knowledge, or judge others.
2. Discuss the relationship between culture, cognition and language. Describe the Sapir-Whorf ("linguistic relativity") hypothesis. What are its explanatory strengths and weaknesses?
Culture, cognition, and language are all interrelated somehow. They all have effects on each other. Sapir and Whorf wondered if people who speak different languages think about the world differently, and if they do, is it because of the structural and lexical differences in the language that is spoken? If people's thinking is really relative to the language that they speak, then it's possible that we could explain the cultural differences in the languages spoken in different cultures. There's not very much research that has been done to support this idea. It's not really that clear-cut. Researchers now believe that thinking is not entirely determined by the language we speak, but it's how we talk to people, objects, or events that may make us pay more or less attention to the certain aspects of these events, people or objects.
3. Identify examples of Vygotsky's contextualist approach during language acquisition and the importance of scaffolding in parent-infant interaction.
Vygotsky felt that cultural influence, mental processes, and language are dynamic processes that occur at the same time. The continuous interaction between language and though, embedded in a particular cultural context, results in dialogue between individuals. This social interaction helps shape the quality of mental abilities at various ages across the lifespan. Children verbally interact with others and they internalize language and use it to organize their thoughts. As children pass through what Vygotsky calls his "zone of proximal development" or ZPD, they acquire specific cognitive skills at the same time they are becoming socialized into a way of life in their culture. An effective method for doing this is known as scaffolding. The amount of scaffolding a child needs may depend on his ability to solve a problem alone.
4. Identify examples of dialectical thought and adaptive logic in early adulthood and discuss how each might be conceptualized and measured in different ecocultural systems.
Dialectical thinking is that for every point of view there is an opposing point of view, and both of these can be considered simultaneously. Adaptive logic involves balancing critical analyses of objective observations with one's subjective reactions to these observations. For example, when an older subject performs a memory task, they may make a conscious decision to tune out much of the detailed information they remember, because they believe it might be uninteresting to the researcher or other listeners.