Cognition and Mental Abilities

The nature of the relationship among environment, experience, and behavioral variation is one of the oldest and one enduring issues in man’s efforts to understand the human behavior. Psychologists have used the term cognition to describe the psychology result of perception, learning, and reasoning, as well as the two mental abilities that they tried to measure which are intelligence and creativity. When talking about all the processes a person has to go through to reach his/her thoughts in order to communicate with others, he/she has to use the three most important building blocks of thought that are: language, images, and concepts. Even though, there are differences and similarities among people such as their cultures, religions, level of education, etc…they all share one system in common to communicate themselves and that is language.
Psychologists and philosophers accepted that cultural differences affect thought. Experiments have shown that people from different cultures observe and think about the world very differently. Benjamin Worf (1956) believed that the language we speak influence our way of thinking. Worf used the linguistic relatively hypothesis well known as linguistic determinism to demonstrates his beliefs. Traditionally, the language American people speak has become an important factor in how male and female are being categorized. For example, in an experiment both men and women were asked to answer about occupations where they placed next to a doctor’s picture a woman or next to a secretary’s picture a man. In this test men and women did not respond quickly, because people’s thoughts are affected according their traditional way of thinking. Animals also have a system of communicating among their species that is called signs. However, numerous studies reveal that only seven animals have the capacity to identify some objects, colors, and numbers as humans do. These non-human species are chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, dolphins, elephants,