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168-616: Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist , psycholinguist , popular science author , and public intellectual . He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind . Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University . He specializes in visual cognition and developmental linguistics , and his experimental topics include mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, regularity and irregularity in language,

336-620: A PhD in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, then became a professor at Harvard and later, Stanford University . From 1982 until 2003 Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT , was the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Science (1985–1994), and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience (1994–1999), taking

504-475: A dual process theory , expounded upon by Daniel Kahneman in 2011. Kahneman differentiated the two styles of processing more, calling them intuition and reasoning. Intuition (or system 1), similar to associative reasoning, was determined to be fast and automatic, usually with strong emotional bonds included in the reasoning process. Kahneman said that this kind of reasoning was based on formed habits and very difficult to change or manipulate. Reasoning (or system 2)

672-533: A spandrel – a feature not adaptive in its own right, but that has persisted through other traits that are more broadly practical, and thus selected for. In How the Mind Works , Pinker reiterates Immanuel Kant 's view that music is not in itself an important cognitive phenomenon, but that it happens to stimulate important auditory and spatio-motor cognitive functions. Pinker compares music to "auditory cheesecake", stating that "As far as biological cause and effect

840-402: A 2001 study deemed it as Canada's most creative neighbourhood because artists comprise 8% of its labour force. The neighbourhood of Mile End in the northwestern part of the borough has been a very multicultural area of the city, and features two of Montreal's well-known bagel establishments , St-Viateur Bagel and Fairmount Bagel . The McGill Ghetto is in the extreme southwestern portion of

1008-535: A 2019 story in Current Affairs , proprietor Nathan Robinson criticised Pinker, saying that he misrepresents his critics' arguments against his work. In 2020, an open letter to the Linguistic Society of America requesting the removal of Pinker from its list of LSA Fellows and its list of media experts was signed by hundreds of academics. The letter accused Pinker of a "pattern of drowning out

1176-450: A broad sense, is the thoughts that a person has about their own thoughts. More specifically, metacognition includes things like: Much of the current study regarding metacognition within the field of cognitive psychology deals with its application within the area of education. Being able to increase a student's metacognitive abilities has been shown to have a significant impact on their learning and study habits. One key aspect of this concept

1344-562: A child would have to learn all forms of all words and would simply retrieve each needed form from memory, in favour of the older alternative theory, the use of words and rules combined by generative phonology . He showed that mistakes made by children indicate the use of default rules to add suffixes such as "-ed": for instance 'breaked' and 'comed' for 'broke' and 'came'. He argued that this shows that irregular verb-forms in English have to be learnt and retrieved from memory individually, and that

1512-478: A daily average ranging from −10.5 to −9 °C (13.1 to 15.8 °F) in January. However, some winter days rise above freezing, allowing for rain on an average of 4 days in January and February each. Usually, snow covering some or all bare ground lasts on average from the first or second week of December until the last week of March. While the air temperature does not fall below −30 °C (−22 °F) every year,

1680-751: A garrison of 390 men 40 miles upriver in a garrison at Les Cèdres, Quebec , to defend Montreal against the British army. In the Battle of the Cedars , Bedel's lieutenant Isaac Butterfield surrendered to George Forster. Forster advanced to Fort Senneville on May 23. By May 24, Arnold was entrenched in Montreal's borough of Lachine . Forster initially approached Lachine, then withdrew to Quinze-Chênes . Arnold's forces then abandoned Lachine to chase Forster. The Americans burned Senneville on May 26. After Arnold crossed

1848-412: A general theory of language acquisition and applied it to children's learning of verbs. In particular, his work with Alan Prince published in 1989 critiqued the connectionist model of how children acquire the past tense of English verbs, positing that children use default rules, such as adding -ed to make regular forms, sometimes in error, but are obliged to learn irregular forms one by one. Pinker

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2016-418: A greater ability to process social information more often display higher levels of socially acceptable behavior; that the type of social interaction that children have affects their relationships. His model asserts that there are five steps that an individual proceeds through when evaluating interactions with other individuals and that how the person interprets cues is key to their reactionary process. Many of

2184-424: A human being might possibly do; that every psychological phenomenon is a cognitive phenomenon. But although cognitive psychology is concerned with all human activity rather than some fraction of it, the concern is from a particular point of view. Other viewpoints are equally legitimate and necessary. Dynamic psychology , which begins with motives rather than with sensory input, is a case in point. Instead of asking how

2352-557: A lecture he gave at Cambridge University in September 2015. In his 2018 book Enlightenment Now , Pinker posited that Enlightenment rationality should be defended against attacks from both the political left and political right. In a debate with Pinker, post-colonial theorist Homi Bhabha said that Enlightenment philosophy had immoral consequences such as inequality, slavery, imperialism, world wars, and genocide, and that Pinker downplayed them. Pinker argued that Bhabha had perceived

2520-402: A man's actions and experiences result from what he saw, remembered, or believed, the dynamic psychologist asks how they follow from the subject's goals, needs, or instincts. The main focus of cognitive psychologists is on the mental processes that affect behavior. Those processes include, but are not limited to, the following three stages of memory: The psychological definition of attention

2688-406: A mind adapted to Stone Age life could work in the modern world. Many quirks of language are the result. Pinker is critical of theories about the evolutionary origins of language that argue that linguistic cognition might have evolved from earlier musical cognition. He sees language as being tied primarily to the capacity for logical reasoning, and speculates that human proclivity for music may be

2856-459: A mission on his new seigneury. The colonists left France in 1641 for Quebec and arrived on the island the following year. On May 17, 1642, Ville-Marie was founded on the southern shore of Montreal island, with Maisonneuve as its first governor. The settlement included a chapel and a hospital, under the command of Jeanne Mance . By 1643, Ville-Marie had come under Iroquois raids. In 1652, Maisonneuve returned to France to raise 100 volunteers to bolster

3024-532: A neural net to create past tense verb forms correctly. Aleksander concludes that while he doesn't support the SSSM, "a cultural repository of language just seems the easy trick for an efficient evolutionary system armed with an iconic state machine to play." Two other books, How the Mind Works (1997) and The Blank Slate (2002), broadly surveyed the mind and defended the idea of a complex human nature with many mental faculties that are genetically adaptive (Pinker

3192-619: A new settlement at their former hunting grounds north of the Ottawa River. This became Kanesatake . In 1745, several Mohawk families moved upriver to create another settlement, known as Akwesasne . All three are now Mohawk reserves in Canada. The Canadian territory was ruled as a French colony until 1760, when Montreal fell to a British offensive during the Seven Years' War . The colony then surrendered to Great Britain. Ville-Marie

3360-800: A one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara , in 1995–96. Since 2003 he has been serving as the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard and between 2008 and 2013 he also held the title of Harvard College Professor in recognition of his dedication to teaching. He currently gives lectures as a visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities , a private college in London. Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced in 1992; he married again in 1995 and again divorced. His third wife, whom he married in 2007,

3528-430: A personal friend of Pinker's who was Jeffrey Epstein 's defense attorney, Pinker's own interpretation of the wording of a federal law pertaining to the enticement of minors into illegal sex acts via the internet. Dershowitz included Pinker's opinion in a letter to the court during proceedings that resulted in a plea deal in which all federal sex trafficking charges against Epstein were dropped. In 2019, Pinker stated that he

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3696-443: A series of studies of how people use and acquire the past tense. This included a monograph on children's regularization of irregular forms and his popular 1999 book, Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language . Pinker argued that language depends on two things: the associative remembering of sounds and their meanings in words, and the use of rules to manipulate symbols for grammar. He presented evidence against connectionism, where

3864-706: A signatory of the Letter on Justice and Open Debate which argued that discussion of political issues was being silenced by a widespread "intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and a tendency to dissolve complex issues into a binding moral certainty." Pinker has sharply criticized social conservatives , such as former chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics Leon Kass , for opposing stem cell research , arguing that their moral views were mere expressions of disgust that were obstructing treatments that could save millions of lives. Pinker

4032-512: A small subset of this information, and this is accomplished through the attentional processes. Attention can be divided into two major attentional systems: exogenous control and endogenous control. Exogenous control works in a bottom-up manner and is responsible for orienting reflex , and pop-out effects. Endogenous control works top-down and is the more deliberate attentional system, responsible for divided attention and conscious processing. One major focal point relating to attention within

4200-542: A specific vantage point (rather than capturing their intrinsic three-dimensional structure), and thus correspond to the neuroscientist David Marr 's theory of a "two-and-a-half-dimensional sketch." He also showed that this level of representation is used in visual attention, and in object recognition (at least for asymmetrical shapes), contrary to Marr's theory that recognition uses viewpoint-independent representations. In psycholinguistics, Pinker became known early in his career for promoting computational learning theory as

4368-574: A spider's web-weaving or a beaver's dam-building. Pinker states in his introduction that his ideas are "deeply influenced" by Chomsky; he also lists scientists whom Chomsky influenced to "open up whole new areas of language study, from child development and speech perception to neurology and genetics" – Eric Lenneberg , George Miller , Roger Brown , Morris Halle and Alvin Liberman . Brown mentored Pinker through his thesis; Pinker stated that Brown's "funny and instructive" book Words and Things (1958)

4536-504: A staple in the realm of education. Piaget's concepts and ideas predated the cognitive revolution but inspired a wealth of research in the field of cognitive psychology and many of his principles have been blended with modern theory to synthesize the predominant views of today. Modern theories of education have applied many concepts that are focal points of cognitive psychology. Some of the most prominent concepts include: Cognitive therapeutic approaches have received considerable attention in

4704-663: A variety of journals, and on the advisory boards of several institutions. Pinker was the chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary from 2008 to 2018. Pinker was born in Montreal , Quebec, in 1954, to a middle-class secular Jewish family in an English-speaking community. His grandparents immigrated to Canada from Poland and Romania in 1926, and owned a small necktie factory in Montreal. His father, Harry, worked in real estate and

4872-463: A way to understand language acquisition in children. He wrote a tutorial review of the field followed by two books that advanced his own theory of language acquisition, and a series of experiments on how children acquire the passive, dative, and locative constructions. These books were Language Learnability and Language Development (1984), in Pinker's words "outlin[ing] a theory of how children acquire

5040-401: Is Île Bizard . The city is 196 km (122 mi) east of the national capital, Ottawa , and 258 km (160 mi) southwest of the provincial capital, Quebec City . As of 2021, the city had a population of 1,762,949, and a metropolitan population of 4,291,732, making it the second-largest metropolitan area in Canada. French is the city's official language. In 2021, 85.7% of

5208-425: Is "a state of focused awareness on a subset of the available sensation perception information". A key function of attention is to identify irrelevant data and filter it out, enabling significant data to be distributed to the other mental processes . For example, the human brain may simultaneously receive auditory , visual , olfactory , taste , and tactile information. The brain is able to consciously handle only

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5376-402: Is a psychologist and writer who authored The Sexual Paradox and The Village Effect . Susan is also a columnist for The Wall Street Journal . Pinker graduated from Dawson College in 1973. He graduated from McGill University in 1976 with a Bachelor of Arts in psychology, then did doctoral studies in experimental psychology at Harvard University under Stephen Kosslyn , receiving

5544-815: Is a frequent participant in public debates surrounding the contributions of science to contemporary society. Social commentators such as Ed West, author of The Diversity Illusion , consider Pinker important and daring in his willingness to confront taboos, as in The Blank Slate . According to West, the doctrine of tabula rasa remained accepted "as fact, rather than fantasy" a decade after the book's publication. West describes Pinker as "no polemicist , and he leaves readers to draw their own conclusions". In January 2005 Pinker defended comments by then-President of Harvard University Lawrence Summers . Summers had speculated that in addition to differing societal demands and discrimination, "different availability of aptitude at

5712-488: Is a general language-oriented style guide . Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) posits that violence in human societies has generally declined over time, and identifies six major trends and five historical forces of this decline, the most important being the humanitarian revolution brought by the Enlightenment and its associated cultivation of reason. Enlightenment Now (2018) further argues that

5880-519: Is a language instinct, and argues that children can learn language because people can learn anything. Others have sought a middle ground between Pinker's nativism and Sampson's culturalism. The assumptions underlying the nativist view have also been questioned in Jeffrey Elman 's Rethinking Innateness : A Connectionist Perspective on Development , which defends the connectionist approach that Pinker attacked. In his 1996 book Impossible Minds ,

6048-531: Is a naturally developing human instinct has been garbled into the evolutionarily improbable claim that reading is a naturally developing human instinct." In the appendix to the 2007 reprinted edition of The Language Instinct , Pinker cited Why Our Children Can't Read by cognitive psychologist Diane McGuinness as his favorite book on the subject and noted: One raging public debate involving language went unmentioned in The Language Instinct :

6216-456: Is an ally of Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins in many disputes surrounding adaptationism ). Another major theme in Pinker's theories is that human cognition works, in part, by combinatorial symbol-manipulation, not just associations among sensory features, as in many connectionist models. On the debate around The Blank Slate , Pinker called Thomas Sowell 's book A Conflict of Visions "wonderful", and explained that "The Tragic Vision" and

6384-419: Is around 1,000 mm (39 in), including an average of about 210 cm (83 in) of snowfall, which occurs from November through March. Thunderstorms are common from late spring through summer to early fall; additionally, tropical storms or their remnants can cause heavy rains and gales. Montreal averages 2,050 hours of sunshine annually, with summer being the sunniest season, though slightly wetter than

6552-427: Is based on verbal thinking , leading to a disorderly picture of the findings from brain imaging and brain lesion studies. When theoretical claims are put aside, the evidence shows that interaction depends on the type of task tested, whether of visuospatial or linguistical orientation; but that there is also an aspect of reasoning which is not covered by either theory. Similarly, neurolinguistics has found that it

6720-465: Is believed to be due to outmigration, epidemics of European diseases, or intertribal wars. In 1611, Champlain established a fur trading post on the Island of Montreal on a site initially named La Place Royale . At the confluence of Petite Riviere and St. Lawrence River , it is where present-day Pointe-à-Callière stands. On his 1616 map, Champlain named the island Lille de Villemenon in honour of

6888-519: Is bordered by the city of Laval to the north; Longueuil , Saint-Lambert , Brossard , and other municipalities to the south; Repentigny to the east and the West Island municipalities to the west. The anglophone enclaves of Westmount , Montreal West , Hampstead , Côte Saint-Luc , the Town of Mount Royal and the francophone enclave Montreal East are all surrounded by Montreal. Montreal

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7056-498: Is classified as a warm-summer humid continental climate ( Köppen climate classification : Dfb). Summers are warm to hot and humid with a daily maximum average of 26 to 27 °C (79 to 81 °F) in July; temperatures in excess of 30 °C (86 °F) are common. Conversely, cold fronts can bring crisp, drier and windy weather in the early and later parts of summer. Winter brings cold, snowy, windy, and, at times, icy weather, with

7224-466: Is concerned, music is useless". This argument has been rejected by Daniel Levitin and Joseph Carroll , experts in music cognition , who argue that music has had an important role in the evolution of human cognition. In his book This Is Your Brain On Music , Levitin argues that music could provide adaptive advantage through sexual selection , social bonding, and cognitive development ; he questions

7392-491: Is easier to make sense of brain imaging studies when the theories are left aside. In the field of language cognition research, generative grammar has taken the position that language resides within its private cognitive module , while 'Cognitive Linguistics' goes to the opposite extreme by claiming that language is not an independent function, but operates on general cognitive capacities such as visual processing and motor skills . Consensus in neuropsychology however takes

7560-537: Is highly involved in the area of artificial intelligence and its application to the understanding of mental processes. Some observers have suggested that as cognitive psychology became a movement during the 1970s, the intricacies of the phenomena and processes it examined meant it also began to lose cohesion as a field of study. In Psychology: Pythagoras to Present , for example, John Malone writes: "Examinations of late twentieth-century textbooks dealing with "cognitive psychology", "human cognition", "cognitive science" and

7728-399: Is lost, and all future generations will treat it as a regular verb instead. In 1990 Pinker, with Paul Bloom , published a paper arguing that the human language faculty must have evolved through natural selection . The article provided arguments for a continuity-based view of language evolution, contrary to then-current discontinuity-based theories that see language as suddenly appearing with

7896-455: Is more likely that human nature comprises inclinations toward violence and those that counteract them, the "better angels of our nature". He outlines several "major historical declines of violence" that all have their own social/cultural/economic causes. Response to the book was divided. Many critics found its arguments convincing and its synthesis of a large volume of historical evidence compelling. This and other aspects drew criticism, including

8064-583: Is not. Like most psycholinguists (but apparently unlike many school boards), I think it's essential for children to be taught to become aware of speech sounds and how they are coded in strings of letters. In The Better Angels of Our Nature , published in 2011, Pinker argues that violence, including tribal warfare, homicide, cruel punishments, child abuse, animal cruelty, domestic violence, lynching, pogroms, and international and civil wars, has decreased over multiple scales of time and magnitude. Pinker considers it unlikely that human nature has changed. In his view, it

8232-412: Is often the case that the advocates of different cognitive models form a dialectic relationship with one another thus affecting empirical research, with researchers siding with their favorite theory. For example, advocates of mental model theory have attempted to find evidence that deductive reasoning is based on image thinking , while the advocates of mental logic theory have tried to prove that it

8400-400: Is often thought of as just short-term memory, it is more clearly defined as the ability to process and maintain temporary information in a wide range of everyday activities in the face of distraction. The famously known capacity of memory of 7 plus or minus 2 is a combination of both memories in working memory and long-term memory. One of the classic experiments is by Ebbinghaus , who found

8568-475: Is poor and getting worse with new ways of speaking, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis that language limits the kinds of thoughts a person can have, and that other great apes can learn languages . Pinker sees language as unique to humans, evolved to solve the specific problem of communication among social hunter-gatherers. He argues that it is as much an instinct as specialized adaptative behavior in other species, such as

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8736-583: Is the Baddeley and Hitch model of working memory . It takes into account both visual and auditory stimuli, long-term memory to use as a reference, and a central processor to combine and understand it all. A large part of memory is forgetting, and there is a large debate among psychologists of decay theory versus interference theory . Modern conceptions of memory are usually about long-term memory and break it down into three main sub-classes. These three classes are somewhat hierarchical in nature, in terms of

8904-579: Is the largest city in the province of Quebec , the second-largest in Canada , and the ninth-largest in North America . Founded in 1642 as Ville-Marie , or "City of Mary", it is now named after Mount Royal , the triple-peaked mountain around which the early settlement was built. The city is centred on the Island of Montreal and a few, much smaller, peripheral islands, the largest of which

9072-466: Is the author of nine books for general audiences. The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), Words and Rules (2000), The Blank Slate (2002), and The Stuff of Thought (2007) describe aspects of psycholinguistics and cognitive science, and include accounts of his own research, positing that language is an innate behavior shaped by natural selection and adapted to our communication needs. Pinker's The Sense of Style (2014)

9240-428: Is the improvement of students' ability to set goals and self-regulate effectively to meet those goals. As a part of this process, it is also important to ensure that students are realistically evaluating their personal degree of knowledge and setting realistic goals (another metacognitive task). Common phenomena related to metacognition include: Modern perspectives on cognitive psychology generally address cognition as

9408-580: Is the location of the headquarters of the International Civil Aviation Organization , and was named a UNESCO City of Design in 2006. In 2017, Montreal was ranked the 12th-most livable city in the world by the Economist Intelligence Unit in its annual Global Liveability Ranking , although its ranking slipped to 40th in the 2021 index, primarily due to stress on the healthcare system from

9576-477: Is the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein . He has two stepdaughters, the novelist Yael Goldstein Love and the poet Danielle Blau. Pinker adopted atheism at 13, but at various times was a "cultural Jew". Pinker is an avid cyclist . Pinker's research on visual cognition, begun in collaboration with his thesis adviser, Stephen Kosslyn, showed that mental images represent scenes and objects as they appear from

9744-691: Is the oldest complete building in the city, built between 1669 and 1671. In Point St. Charles , visitors can see the Maison Saint-Gabriel , which can trace its history back to 1698. There are many historic buildings in Old Montreal in their original form: Notre-Dame Basilica, Bonsecours Market , and the 19th‑century headquarters of all major Canadian banks on St. James Street (French: Rue Saint Jacques ). Montreal's earliest buildings are characterized by their uniquely French influence and grey stone construction. A few notable examples of

9912-518: The Annals of Improbable Research . Cognitive psychology Philosophically, ruminations on the human mind and its processes have been around since the times of the ancient Greeks . In 387 BCE, Plato had suggested that the brain was the seat of the mental processes. In 1637, René Descartes posited that humans are born with innate ideas and forwarded the idea of mind-body dualism , which would come to be known as substance dualism (essentially

10080-640: The Allied forces , was furious over Houde's stand and held him in a prison camp until 1944. That year, the government decided to institute conscription to expand the armed forces and fight the Axis powers . (See Conscription Crisis of 1944 .) Montreal was the official residence of the Luxembourg royal family in exile during World War II. By 1951, Montreal's population had surpassed one million. However, Toronto's growth had begun challenging Montreal's status as

10248-931: The American Psychological Association , the Troland Research Award (1993) from the National Academy of Sciences , the Henry Dale Prize (2004) from the Royal Institution of Great Britain , and the George Miller Prize (2010) from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society . He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle , Surrey , Tel Aviv , McGill , Simon Fraser University and

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10416-643: The COVID-19 pandemic . It is regularly ranked as one of the ten best cities in the world to be a university student in the QS World University Rankings . In 2018, Montreal was ranked as a global city . Montreal has hosted numerous important international events, including the 1967 International and Universal Exposition , and is the only Canadian city to have hosted the Summer Olympics, having done so in 1976 . The city hosts

10584-767: The Canadian Grand Prix of Formula One ; the Montreal International Jazz Festival , the largest jazz festival in the world; the Just for Laughs festival, the largest comedy festival in the world; and Les Francos de Montréal , the largest French-language music festival in the world. In sports , it is home to multiple professional teams, most notably the Canadiens of the National Hockey League , who have won

10752-731: The Great Lakes to the Atlantic. Montreal is defined by its location between the Saint Lawrence river to its south and the Rivière des Prairies to its north. The city is named after the most prominent geographical feature on the island, a three-head mountain called Mount Royal, topped at 232 m (761 ft) above sea level . Montreal is at the centre of the Montreal Metropolitan Community , and

10920-587: The Iroquois nations of the Haudenosaunee (then based in present-day New York), established the village of Hochelaga at the foot of Mount Royal two centuries before the French arrived. Archeologists have found evidence of their habitation there and at other locations in the valley since at least the 14th century. The French explorer Jacques Cartier visited Hochelaga on October 2, 1535, and estimated

11088-536: The Montreal Biosphere , and Moshe Safdie 's striking Habitat 67 apartment complex. The Montreal Metro has public artwork by some of the biggest names in Quebec culture . In 2006, Montreal was named a UNESCO City of Design , one of only three design capitals in the world (the others being Berlin and Buenos Aires ). This distinguished title recognizes Montreal's design community. Since 2005,

11256-610: The Ottawa River in pursuit of Forster, Forster's cannons repelled Arnold's forces. Forster negotiated a prisoner exchange with Henry Sherburne and Isaac Butterfield, resulting in a May 27 boating of their deputy Lieutenant Park being returned to the Americans. Arnold and Forster negotiated further and more American prisoners were returned to Arnold at Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec , ("Fort Anne") on May 30 (delayed two days by wind). Arnold eventually withdrew his forces back to

11424-648: The Personal Genome Project and its possible impact on the understanding of human nature in The New York Times . He discussed the new developments in epigenetics and gene-environment interactions in the afterword to the 2016 edition of his book The Blank Slate . Pinker has been criticised for using the data of scientific racists (on subjects unrelated to race), such as the blogger Steven Sailer , with journalist Angela Saini stating that "for many people, Pinker's willingness to entertain

11592-468: The Plains of Abraham , Montreal fell to American forces led by Richard Montgomery on November 13, 1775, after it was abandoned by Guy Carleton . After Arnold withdrew from Quebec City to Pointe-aux-Trembles on November 19, Montgomery's forces left Montreal on December 1 and arrived there on December 3 to plot to attack Quebec City , with Montgomery leaving David Wooster in charge of the city. Montgomery

11760-557: The Shaughnessy Village / Concordia U area home to thousands of students at Concordia University . The borough also comprises most of Mount Royal Park , Saint Helen's Island , and Notre-Dame Island . The Plateau Mount Royal borough was a working class francophone area. The largest neighbourhood is the Plateau (not to be confused with the whole borough), which was undergoing considerable gentrification as of 2009, and

11928-672: The Stanley Cup a record 24 times. In the Ojibwe language , the land is called Mooniyaang or Moon’yaang which was "the first stopping place" in the Ojibwe migration story as related in the seven fires prophecy . In the Mohawk language , the land is called Tiohtià:ke . This is an abbreviation of Teionihtiohtiá:kon , which loosely translates as "where the group divided/parted ways." French settlers from La Flèche in

12096-835: The University of Tromsø . He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize , in 1998 and in 2003. Pinker received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1999. On May 13, 2006, he received the American Humanist Association 's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution. For 2022 he was awarded the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in

12264-472: The machine intelligence researcher Igor Aleksander calls The Language Instinct excellent, and argues that Pinker presents a relatively soft claim for innatism, accompanied by a strong dislike of the 'Standard Social Sciences Model' or SSSM (Pinker's term), which supposes that development is purely dependent on culture. Further, Aleksander writes that while Pinker criticises some attempts to explain language processing with neural nets, Pinker later makes use of

12432-652: The prohibition movement in the United States led to Montreal becoming a destination for Americans looking for alcohol . Unemployment remained high in the city and was exacerbated by the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression . During World War II , Mayor Camillien Houde protested against conscription and urged Montrealers to disobey the federal government's registry of all men and women. The federal government, part of

12600-476: The serial position effect where information from the beginning and end of the list of random words were better recalled than those in the center. This primacy and recency effect varies in intensity based on list length. Its typical U-shaped curve can be disrupted by an attention-grabbing word; this is known as the Von Restorff effect . Many models of working memory have been made. One of the most regarded

12768-520: The taxation of carbon , and the abolition of capital punishment . Pinker is a strong supporter of the Democratic Party . However, Pinker has argued that the far-left has created an atmosphere of intellectual intolerance on college campuses and elsewhere, and helped form the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard to combat what he described as an epidemic of censorship at universities. He was

12936-738: The wind chill often makes the temperature feel this low to exposed skin. Spring and fall are pleasantly mild but prone to drastic temperature changes; spring even more so than fall. Late season heat waves as well as " Indian summers " are possible. Early and late season snow storms can occur in November and March, and more rarely in April. Montreal is generally snow free from late April to late October. However, snow can fall in early to mid-October as well as early to mid-May on rare occasions. The lowest temperature in Environment Canada's books

13104-495: The "Utopian Vision" are the views of human nature behind right- and left-wing ideologies. In Words and Rules: the Ingredients of Language (1999), Pinker argues from his own research that regular and irregular phenomena are products of computation and memory lookup, respectively, and that language can be understood as an interaction between the two. "Words and Rules" is also the title of an essay by Pinker outlining many of

13272-413: The "reading wars," or dispute over whether children should be explicitly taught to read by decoding the sounds of words from their spelling (loosely known as "phonics") or whether they can develop it instinctively by being immersed in a text-rich environment (often called "whole language"). I tipped my hand in the paragraph in [the sixth chapter of the book] which said that language is an instinct but reading

13440-514: The 1920s to the 1950s, the main approach to psychology was behaviorism . Initially, its adherents viewed mental events such as thoughts, ideas, attention, and consciousness as unobservable, hence outside the realm of a science of psychology. One early pioneer of cognitive psychology, whose work predated much of behaviorist literature, was Carl Jung . Jung introduced the hypothesis of cognitive functions in his 1921 book Psychological Types . Another pioneer of cognitive psychology, who worked outside

13608-410: The 1980s and early 1990s, Montreal experienced a slower rate of economic growth than many other major Canadian cities. Montreal was the site of the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre , one of Canada's worst mass shootings , where 25-year-old Marc Lépine shot and killed 14 people, all of them women, and wounded 14 other people before shooting himself at École Polytechnique . Montreal was merged with

13776-424: The 21st Century (2014), Pinker attempts to provide a writing style guide that is informed by modern science and psychology, given that William Strunk wrote The Elements of Style in 1918, nearly a full century prior to Pinker’s publication. Pinker identifies as a liberal who is critical of some aspects of the far-left . He supports same-sex marriage , a universal basic income , the legalization of drugs ,

13944-494: The 27 surrounding municipalities on the Island of Montreal on January 1, 2002, creating a unified city encompassing the entire island. There was substantial resistance from the suburbs to the merger, with the perception being that it was forced on the mostly English suburbs by the Parti Québécois. As expected, this move proved unpopular and several mergers were later rescinded. Several former municipalities, totalling 13% of

14112-702: The English-allied Iroquois attacked Lachine on the Island of Montreal, committing the worst massacre in the history of New France. By the early 18th century, the Sulpician Order was established there. To encourage French settlement, it wanted the Mohawk to move away from the fur trading post at Ville-Marie. It had a mission village, known as Kahnewake , south of the St Lawrence River. The fathers persuaded some Mohawk to make

14280-574: The Loire valley first named their new town, founded in 1642, Ville Marie ("City of Mary"), named for the Virgin Mary . The current form of the name, Montréal , is generally thought to be derived from Mount Royal ( Mont Royal in French), the triple-peaked hill in the heart of the city. There are multiple explanations for how Mont Royal became Montréal . In 16th century French,

14448-540: The New York fort of Ticonderoga by the summer. On June 15, Arnold's messenger approaching Sorel spotted Carleton returning with a fleet of ships and notified him. Arnold's forces abandoned Montreal (attempting to burn it down in the process) prior to the June 17 arrival of Carleton's fleet. The Americans did not return British prisoners in exchange, as previously agreed, due to accusations of abuse, with Congress repudiating

14616-617: The advent of Homo sapiens as a kind of evolutionary accident. This discontinuity-based view was prominently argued by two main authorities, linguist Noam Chomsky and Stephen Jay Gould . The paper became widely cited and created renewed interest in the evolutionary prehistory of language, and has been credited with shifting the central question of the debate from "did language evolve?" to " how did language evolve?" The article also presaged Pinker's argument in The Language Instinct . In 2006 Pinker provided to Alan Dershowitz ,

14784-525: The agreement at the protest of George Washington. Arnold blamed Colonel Timothy Bedel for the defeat, removing him and Lieutenant Butterfield from command and sending them to Sorel for court-martial. The retreat of the American army delayed their court martial until August 1, 1776, when they were convicted and cashiered at Ticonderoga. Bedel was given a new commission by Congress in October 1777 after Arnold

14952-820: The areas of recognition and treatment of depression has gained worldwide recognition. In his 1987 book titled Cognitive Therapy of Depression , Beck puts forth three salient points with regard to his reasoning for the treatment of depression by means of therapy or therapy and antidepressants versus using a pharmacological-only approach: 1. Despite the prevalent use of antidepressants, the fact remains that not all patients respond to them. Beck cites (in 1987) that only 60 to 65% of patients respond to antidepressants, and recent meta-analyses (a statistical breakdown of multiple studies) show very similar numbers. 2. Many of those who do respond to antidepressants end up not taking their medications, for various reasons. They may develop side-effects or have some form of personal objection to taking

15120-450: The assumption that music is the antecedent to language, as opposed to its progenitor, noting that many species display music-like habits that could be seen as precursors to human music. Pinker has also been critical of " whole language " reading instruction techniques, stating in How the Mind Works , "...   the dominant technique, called 'whole language,' the insight that [spoken] language

15288-605: The border between French and English Canada, Ottawa was seen as a compromise between Montreal, Toronto, Kingston and Quebec City, which were all vying to become the young nation's official capital. Ottawa retained the status as capital of Canada when the Province of Canada joined with Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to form the Dominion of Canada in 1867. An internment camp was set up at Immigration Hall in Montreal from August 1914 to November 1918. After World War I ,

15456-423: The borough, its name being derived from the fact that it is home to thousands of McGill University students and faculty members. The Southwest borough was home to much of the city's industry during the late 19th and early-to-mid 20th century. The borough included Goose Village and was historically home to the traditionally working-class Irish neighbourhoods of Griffintown and Point Saint Charles as well as

15624-522: The boundaries (both intellectual and geographical) of behaviorism, was Jean Piaget . From 1926 to the 1950s and into the 1980s, he studied the thoughts, language, and intelligence of children and adults. In the mid-20th century, four main influences arose that would inspire and shape cognitive psychology as a formal school of thought: Ulric Neisser put the term "cognitive psychology" into common use through his book Cognitive Psychology , published in 1967. Neisser's definition of "cognition" illustrates

15792-606: The business arena. The October Crisis and the 1976 election of the Parti Québécois , which supported sovereign status for Quebec, resulted in the departure of many businesses and people from the city. In 1976, Montreal hosted the Summer Olympics . While the event brought the city international prestige and attention, the Olympic Stadium built for the event resulted in massive debt for the city. During

15960-679: The category of "Humanities and Social Sciences". From 2008 to 2018, Pinker chaired the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary . He wrote the essay on usage for the fifth edition of the Dictionary, published in 2011. In February 2001, Pinker, "whose hair has long been the object of admiration, and envy, and intense study", was nominated by acclamation as the first member of the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS) organized by

16128-399: The causal relationship between Enlightenment thinking and these sources of suffering "backwards", responding in part that "The natural state of humanity, at least since the dawn of civilization, is poverty, disease, ignorance, exploitation, and violence (including slavery and imperial conquest). It is knowledge, mobilised to improve human welfare, that allows anyone to rise above this state." In

16296-634: The child develops ToM, they are unable to understand that those around them can have different thoughts, ideas, or feelings than themselves. The development of ToM is a matter of metacognition , or thinking about one's thoughts. The child must be able to recognize that they have their own thoughts and in turn, that others possess thoughts of their own. One of the foremost minds with regard to developmental psychology, Jean Piaget, focused much of his attention on cognitive development from birth through adulthood. Though there have been considerable challenges to parts of his stages of cognitive development , they remain

16464-417: The children making these errors were predicting the regular "-ed" ending in an open-ended way by applying a mental rule. This rule for combining verb stems and the usual suffix can be expressed as V past → V stem + d, where V is a verb and d is the regular ending. Pinker further argued that since the ten most frequently occurring English verbs (be, have, do, say, make ... ) are all irregular, while 98.2% of

16632-631: The city has been home to the International Council of Graphic Design Associations (Icograda) and the International Design Alliance (IDA). The Underground City (officially RÉSO), an important tourist attraction, is an underground network connecting shopping centres, pedestrian thoroughfares, universities, hotels, restaurants, bistros, subway stations and more, in and around downtown with 32 km (20 mi) of tunnels over 12 km (4.6 sq mi) in

16800-582: The city's 20th-century architecture include Saint Joseph's Oratory , completed in 1967, Ernest Cormier 's Art Deco Université de Montréal main building, the landmark Place Ville Marie office tower, and the controversial Olympic Stadium and surrounding structures. Pavilions designed for the 1967 International and Universal Exposition, popularly known as Expo 67 , featured a wide range of architectural designs. Though most pavilions were temporary structures, several have become landmarks, including Buckminster Fuller 's geodesic dome U.S. Pavilion, now

16968-672: The city's earliest still-standing buildings date back to the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Although most are clustered around the Old Montreal area, such as the Sulpician Seminary adjacent to Notre-Dame Basilica that dates back to 1687, and Château Ramezay , which was built in 1705, examples of early colonial architecture are dotted throughout the city. Situated in Lachine, the Le Ber-Le Moyne House

17136-489: The city's history. Montreal annexed 27 other cities, towns and villages beginning with Hochelaga in 1883, with the last prior to 2002 being Pointe-aux-Trembles in 1982. The 21st century has brought with it a revival of the city's economic and cultural landscape. The construction of new residential skyscrapers, two super-hospitals (the Centre hospitalier de l'Université de Montréal and McGill University Health Centre ),

17304-518: The city. As they lacked modern plumbing systems it was impossible to connect all buildings at once and it also acted as a conservation method. However, the population was not finished rising — it rose from 58,000 in 1852 to 267,000 by 1901. Montreal was the capital of the Province of Canada from 1844 to 1849, but lost its status when a Tory mob burnt down the Parliament building to protest

17472-481: The cognitive processes involved with language that dates back to the 1870s, when Carl Wernicke proposed a model for the mental processing of language. Current work on language within the field of cognitive psychology varies widely. Cognitive psychologists may study language acquisition , individual components of language formation (like phonemes ), how language use is involved in mood , or numerous other related areas. Significant work has focused on understanding

17640-427: The colonial population. If the effort had failed, Montreal was to be abandoned and the survivors re-located downriver to Quebec City . Before these 100 arrived in the fall of 1653, the population of Montreal was barely 50 people. By 1685, Ville-Marie was home to some 600 colonists, most of them living in modest wooden houses. Ville-Marie became a centre for the fur trade and a base for further exploration . In 1689,

17808-498: The connectionists) are doing is turning over the rocks at the base of the intellectual landslide caused by the Chomskian revolution." In The Stuff of Thought (2007), Pinker looks at a wide range of issues around the way words related to thoughts on the one hand, and to the world outside ourselves on the other. Given his evolutionary perspective, a central question is how an intelligent mind capable of abstract thought evolved: how

17976-623: The content of the unattended message, while they can shadow a message better if the pitches in each ear are different. However, while deep processing does not occur, early sensory processing does. Subjects did notice if the pitch of the unattended message changed or if it ceased altogether, and some even oriented to the unattended message if their name was mentioned. The two main types of memory are short-term memory and long-term memory; however, short-term memory has become better understood to be working memory. Cognitive psychologists often study memory in terms of working memory . Though working memory

18144-427: The corpus of information feeding the theories used by cognitive psychologists. Cognitive scientists' research sometimes involves non-human subjects, allowing them to delve into areas which would come under ethical scrutiny if performed on human participants. For instance, they may do research implanting devices in the brains of rats to track the firing of neurons while the rat performs a particular task. Cognitive science

18312-592: The creation of the Quartier des Spectacles , reconstruction of the Turcot Interchange , reconfiguration of the Decarie and Dorval interchanges, construction of the new Réseau express métropolitain , gentrification of Griffintown , subway line extensions and the purchase of new subway cars, the complete revitalization and expansion of Trudeau International Airport , the completion of Quebec Autoroute 30 ,

18480-408: The drugs. 3. Beck posits that the use of psychotropic drugs may lead to an eventual breakdown in the individual's coping mechanisms . His theory is that the person essentially becomes reliant on the medication as a means of improving mood and fails to practice those coping techniques typically practiced by healthy individuals to alleviate the effects of depressive symptoms. By failing to do so, once

18648-406: The ear not being consciously attended to. For example, participants (wearing earphones) may be told that they will be hearing separate messages in each ear and that they are expected to attend only to information related to basketball. When the experiment starts, the message about basketball will be presented to the left ear and non-relevant information will be presented to the right ear. At some point

18816-620: The economic capital of Canada. Indeed, the volume of stocks traded at the Toronto Stock Exchange had already surpassed that traded at the Montreal Stock Exchange in the 1940s. The Saint Lawrence Seaway opened in 1959, allowing vessels to bypass Montreal. In time, this development led to the end of the city's economic dominance as businesses moved to other areas. During the 1960s, there was continued growth as Canada's tallest skyscrapers, new expressways and

18984-743: The effect, if any, of draft order on quarterback performance in the National Football League . Advanced NFL Stats addressed the issue statistically, siding with Pinker and showing that differences in methodology could explain the two men's differing opinions. In an appearance for BBC World Service 's Exchanges At The Frontier programme, an audience member questioned whether the virtuous developments in culture and human nature (documented in The Better Angels of Our Nature ) could have expressed in our biology either through genetic or epigenetic expression. Pinker responded that it

19152-455: The field of cognitive psychology is the concept of divided attention. A number of early studies dealt with the ability of a person wearing headphones to discern meaningful conversation when presented with different messages into each ear; this is known as the dichotic listening task. Key findings involved an increased understanding of the mind's ability to both focus on one message, while still being somewhat aware of information being taken in from

19320-509: The forms réal and royal were used interchangeably, so Montréal could simply be a variant of Mont Royal . In the second explanation, the name came from an Italian translation. Venetian geographer Giovanni Battista Ramusio used the name Monte Real to designate Mount Royal in his 1556 map of the region. However, the Commission de toponymie du Québec disputes this explanation. Historiographer François de Belleforest

19488-499: The goal of gathering information related to how the human mind takes in, processes, and acts upon inputs received from the outside world. The information gained in this area is then often used in the applied field of clinical psychology . Cognitive science is better understood as predominantly concerned with a much broader scope, with links to philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, neuroscience, and particularly with artificial intelligence. It could be said that cognitive science provides

19656-444: The high end" may contribute to gender gaps in mathematics and science . In a debate between Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke on gender and science, Pinker argued in favor of the proposition that the gender difference in representation in elite universities was "explainable by some combination of biological differences in average temperaments and talents interacting with socialization and bias". In January 2009 Pinker wrote an article about

19824-639: The human condition has generally improved over recent history because of reason, science, and humanism . The nature and importance of reason is also discussed in his next book Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters (2021). In 2004, Pinker was named in Time ' s "The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today", and in the years 2005, 2008, 2010, and 2011 in Foreign Policy ' s list of "Top 100 Global Thinkers". Pinker

19992-567: The human mind interprets stimuli from the senses and how these interpretations affect behavior. An example of the way in which modern psychologists approach the study of perception is the research being done at the Center for Ecological Study of Perception and Action at the University of Connecticut (CESPA). One study at CESPA concerns ways in which individuals perceive their physical environment and how that influences their navigation through that environment. Psychologists have had an interest in

20160-405: The idea that the mind and the body are two separate substances). From that time, major debates ensued through the 19th century regarding whether human thought was solely experiential ( empiricism ), or included innate knowledge ( nativism ). Some of those involved in this debate included George Berkeley and John Locke on the side of empiricism, and Immanuel Kant on the side of nativism. With

20328-813: The level of conscious thought related to their use. Perception involves both the physical senses (sight, smell, hearing, taste, touch, and proprioception ) as well as the cognitive processes involved in interpreting those senses. Essentially, it is how people come to understand the world around them through the interpretation of stimuli. Early psychologists like Edward B. Titchener began to work with perception in their structuralist approach to psychology. Structuralism dealt heavily with trying to reduce human thought (or "consciousness", as Titchener would have called it) into its most basic elements by gaining an understanding of how an individual perceives particular stimuli. Current perspectives on perception within cognitive psychology tend to focus on particular ways in which

20496-423: The like quickly reveal that there are many, many varieties of cognitive psychology and very little agreement about exactly what may be its domain." This misfortune produced competing models that questioned information-processing approaches to cognitive functioning such as Decision Making and Behavioral Sciences . In the early years of cognitive psychology, behaviorist critics held that the empiricism it pursued

20664-504: The message related to basketball will switch to the right ear and the non-relevant information to the left ear. When this happens, the listener is usually able to repeat the entire message at the end, having attended to the left or right ear only when it was appropriate. The ability to attend to one conversation in the face of many is known as the cocktail party effect . Other major findings include that participants cannot comprehend both passages when shadowing one passage, they cannot report

20832-593: The mid-1840s, the City of Montreal installed a water system that would pump water from the St. Lawrence and into cisterns . The cisterns would then be transported to the desired location. This was not the first water system of its type in Montreal, as there had been one in private ownership since 1801. In the middle of the 19th century, water distribution was carried out by "fontainiers". The fountainiers would open and close water valves outside of buildings, as directed, all over

21000-520: The middle position that, while language is a specialized function, it overlaps or interacts with visual processing. Nonetheless, much of the research in language cognition continues to be divided along the lines of generative grammar and Cognitive Linguistics; and this, again, affects adjacent research fields including language development and language acquisition . Categorization Knowledge representation Language Memory Perception Thinking Montreal Montreal

21168-493: The most densely populated part of Montreal. The city is composed of 19 large boroughs , subdivided into neighbourhoods. The boroughs are: Côte-des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce , Le Plateau-Mont-Royal ( The Plateau Mount Royal ) , Outremont and Ville-Marie in the centre; Mercier–Hochelaga-Maisonneuve , Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie and Villeray–Saint-Michel–Parc-Extension in the east; Anjou , Montréal-Nord , Rivière-des-Prairies–Pointe-aux-Trembles and Saint-Léonard in

21336-544: The most neighbourhoods is Ville-Marie, which includes downtown, the historic district of Old Montreal, Chinatown , the Gay Village , the Latin Quarter , the gentrified Quartier international and Cité Multimédia as well as the Quartier des spectacles which is under development. Other neighbourhoods of interest in the borough include the affluent Golden Square Mile neighbourhood at the foot of Mount Royal and

21504-493: The neural basis of words and grammar, and childhood language development. Other experimental topics he works on are the psychology of cooperation and of communication, including emotional expression, euphemism , innuendo , and how people use "common knowledge", a term of art meaning the shared understanding in which two or more people know something, know that the other one knows, know the other one knows that they know, and so on. Pinker has written two technical books that proposed

21672-406: The northeast; Ahuntsic-Cartierville , L'Île-Bizard–Sainte-Geneviève , Pierrefonds-Roxboro and Saint-Laurent in the northwest; and Lachine , LaSalle , Le Sud-Ouest ( The Southwest ) and Verdun in the south. Many of these boroughs were independent cities that were forced to merge with Montreal in January 2002 following the 2002 municipal reorganization of Montreal . The borough with

21840-546: The others in terms of total precipitation—mostly from thunderstorms. For over a century and a half, Montreal was the industrial and financial centre of Canada. This legacy has left a variety of buildings including factories, elevators , warehouses , mills, and refineries , that today provide an invaluable insight into the city's history, especially in the downtown area and the Old Port area. There are 50 National Historic Sites of Canada , more than any other city. Some of

22008-502: The passage of the Rebellion Losses Bill . Thereafter, the capital rotated between Quebec City and Toronto until in 1857, Queen Victoria herself established Ottawa as the capital due to strategic reasons. The reasons were twofold. First, because it was located more in the interior of the Province of Canada, it was less susceptible to attack from the United States. Second, and perhaps more importantly, because it lay on

22176-543: The patient is weaned off of the antidepressants, they often are unable to cope with normal levels of depressed mood and feel driven to reinstate use of the antidepressants. Many facets of modern social psychology have roots in research done within the field of cognitive psychology. Social cognition is a specific sub-set of social psychology that concentrates on processes that have been of particular focus within cognitive psychology, specifically applied to human interactions. Gordon B. Moskowitz defines social cognition as "...

22344-702: The philosophical debate continuing, the mid to late 19th century was a critical time in the development of psychology as a scientific discipline. Two discoveries that would later play substantial roles in cognitive psychology were Paul Broca 's discovery of the area of the brain largely responsible for language production, and Carl Wernicke 's discovery of an area thought to be mostly responsible for comprehension of language. Both areas were subsequently formally named for their founders, and disruptions of an individual's language production or comprehension due to trauma or malformation in these areas have come to commonly be known as Broca's aphasia and Wernicke's aphasia . From

22512-722: The population of the city of Montreal considered themselves fluent in French while 90.2% could speak it in the metropolitan area. Montreal is one of the most bilingual cities in Quebec and Canada, with 58.5% of the population able to speak both French and English. Historically the commercial capital of Canada, Montreal was surpassed in population and economic strength by Toronto in the 1970s. It remains an important centre of art, culture , literature, film and television, music, commerce, aerospace, transport , finance, pharmaceuticals, technology, design, education , tourism , food, fashion, video game development, and world affairs. Montreal

22680-402: The population of the island, voted to leave the unified city in separate referendums in June 2004. The demerger took place on January 1, 2006, leaving 15 municipalities on the island, including Montreal. Demerged municipalities remain affiliated with the city through an agglomeration council that collects taxes from them to pay for numerous shared services. The 2002 mergers were not the first in

22848-473: The population of the native people at Hochelaga to be "over a thousand people". Evidence of earlier occupation of the island, such as those uncovered in 1642 during the construction of Fort Ville-Marie, have effectively been removed. In 1603, French explorer Samuel de Champlain reported that the St ;Lawrence Iroquoians and their settlements had disappeared altogether from the St Lawrence valley. This

23016-433: The processes required for human language: retrieving whole words from memory, like the past form of the irregular verb "bring", namely "brought"; and using rules to combine (parts of) words, like the past form of the regular verb "walk", namely "walked". In 1988 Pinker and Alan Prince published a critique of a connectionist model of the acquisition of the past tense (a textbook problem in language acquisition), followed by

23184-489: The prominent names in the field of developmental psychology base their understanding of development on cognitive models. One of the major paradigms of developmental psychology, the Theory of Mind (ToM), deals specifically with the ability of an individual to effectively understand and attribute cognition to those around them. This concept typically becomes fully apparent in children between the ages of 4 and 6. Essentially, before

23352-543: The reconstruction of the Champlain Bridge and the construction of a new toll bridge to Laval are helping Montreal continue to grow. Montreal is in the southwest of the province of Quebec. The city covers most of the Island of Montreal at the confluence of the Saint Lawrence and Ottawa Rivers. The port of Montreal lies at one end of the Saint Lawrence Seaway, the river gateway that stretches from

23520-410: The related claim that grammar is innate and genetically based, has been contested by linguists such as Geoffrey Sampson in his 1997 book, Educating Eve: The 'Language Instinct' Debate . Sampson argues that "while it may seem attractive to argue the nature side of the 'nature versus nurture' debate, the nurture side may better support the creativity and nobility of the human mind." Sampson denies there

23688-544: The sieur de Villemenon, a French dignitary who was seeking the viceroyship of New France. In 1639, Jérôme Le Royer de La Dauversière obtained the Seigneurial title to the Island of Montreal in the name of the Notre Dame Society of Montreal to establish a Roman Catholic mission to evangelize natives. Dauversière hired Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve , then age 30, to lead a group of colonists to build

23856-474: The study of the mental processes involved in perceiving, attending to, remembering, thinking about, and making sense of the people in our social world". The development of multiple social information processing (SIP) models has been influential in studies involving aggressive and anti-social behavior. Kenneth Dodge's SIP model is one of, if not the most, empirically supported models relating to aggression. Among his research, Dodge posits that children who possess

24024-669: The subway system known as the Montreal Metro were finished during this time. Montreal also held the World's Fair of 1967, better known as Expo67 . The 1970s ushered in a period of wide-ranging social and political changes, stemming largely from the concerns of the French-speaking majority about the conservation of their culture and language, given the traditional predominance of the English Canadian minority in

24192-539: The theatre of ideas." Several academics criticized the letter and expressed support for Pinker. The executive committee of the Linguistic Society of America declined to strike Pinker from its lists and issued a response letter stating that "It is not the mission of the Society to control the opinions of its members, nor their expression." Pinker was named one of Time ' s 100 most influential people in

24360-421: The then-progressive concept of cognitive processes: The term "cognition" refers to all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used. It is concerned with these processes even when they operate in the absence of relevant stimulation, as in images and hallucinations . ... Given such a sweeping definition, it is apparent that cognition is involved in everything

24528-399: The thousand least common verbs are regular, there is a "massive correlation" of frequency and irregularity. He explains this by arguing that every irregular form, such as 'took', 'came' and 'got', has to be committed to memory by the children in each generation, or else lost, and that the common forms are the most easily memorized. Any irregular verb that falls in popularity past a certain point

24696-519: The timing of language acquisition and how it can be used to determine if a child has, or is at risk of, developing a learning disability . A study from 2012 showed that, while this can be an effective strategy, it is important that those making evaluations include all relevant information when making their assessments. Factors such as individual variability, socioeconomic status , short-term and long-term memory capacity, and others must be included in order to make valid assessments. Metacognition , in

24864-821: The topics discussed in the book. Critiqueing the book from the perspective of generative linguistics Charles Yang , in the London Review of Books , writes that "this book never runs low on hubris or hyperbole". The book's topic, the English past tense, is in Yang's view unglamorous, and Pinker's attempts at compromise risk being in no man's land between rival theories. Giving the example of German, Yang argues that irregular nouns in that language at least all belong to classes, governed by rules, and that things get even worse in languages that attach prefixes and suffixes to make up long 'words': they can't be learnt individually, as there are untold numbers of combinations. "All Pinker (and

25032-547: The treatment of personality disorders in recent years. The approach focuses on the formation of what it believes to be faulty schemata, centralized on judgmental biases and general cognitive errors. The line between cognitive psychology and cognitive science can be blurry. Cognitive psychology is better understood as predominantly concerned with applied psychology and the understanding of psychological phenomena. Cognitive psychologists are often heavily involved in running psychological experiments involving human participants, with

25200-404: The use of deaths per capita as a metric, Pinker's liberal humanism, the focus on Europe, the interpretation of historical data, and its image of indigenous people. Archaeologist David Wengrow summarized Pinker's approach to archaeological science as "a modern psychologist making it up as he goes along". In his seventh popular book, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in

25368-399: The voices of people suffering from racist and sexist violence, in particular in the immediate aftermath of violent acts and/or protests against the systems that created them", citing as examples six of Pinker's tweets. Pinker said in reply that through this letter, he, and more importantly, younger academics with less protection, were being threatened by "a regime of intimidation that constricts

25536-474: The words and grammatical structures of their mother tongue", and Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure (1989), in Pinker's words "focus[ing] on one aspect of this process, the ability to use different kinds of verbs in appropriate sentences, such as intransitive verbs, transitive verbs, and verbs taking different combinations of complements and indirect objects". He then focused on verbs of two kinds that illustrate what he considers to be

25704-406: The work of individuals who are on the far right and white supremacists has gone beyond the pale". Pinker has stated that he condemns racism. In a November 2009 article for The New York Times , Pinker wrote a mixed review of Malcolm Gladwell 's essays, criticizing his analytical methods. Gladwell replied, disputing Pinker's comments about the importance of IQ on teaching performance and by analogy

25872-490: The world in 2004 and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy ' s 100 top public intellectuals in both years the poll was carried out, 2005 and 2008; in 2010 and 2011 he was named by Foreign Policy to its list of top global thinkers. In 2016, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences . His research in cognitive psychology has won the Early Career Award (1984) and Boyd McCandless Award (1986) from

26040-459: Was a lawyer. His mother, Roslyn, was originally a homemaker, but later became a guidance counsellor and a high-school vice-principal. In an interview, Pinker described his mother as "very intellectual" and "an intense reader [who] knows everything". His brother, Robert, worked for the Canadian government for several decades as an administrator and a policy analyst, while his sister, Susan Pinker ,

26208-533: Was also included in Prospect Magazine's top 10 "World Thinkers" in 2013. He has won awards from the American Psychological Association , the National Academy of Sciences , the Royal Institution , the Cognitive Neuroscience Society , and the American Humanist Association . He delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 2013. He has served on the editorial boards of

26376-666: Was assigned to defend Rhode Island in July 1777 . Montreal was incorporated as a city in 1832. The opening of the Lachine Canal permitted ships to bypass the unnavigable Lachine Rapids , while the construction of the Victoria Bridge established Montreal as a major railway hub. The leaders of Montreal's business community had started to build their homes in the Golden Square Mile from about 1850. By 1860, it

26544-447: Was incompatible with the concept of internal mental states. However, cognitive neuroscience continues to gather evidence of direct correlations between physiological brain activity and mental states, endorsing the basis for cognitive psychology. There is however disagreement between neuropsychologists and cognitive psychologists. Cognitive psychology has produced models of cognition which are not supported by modern brain science . It

26712-414: Was killed in the failed attack and Arnold, who had taken command, sent Brigadier General Moses Hazen to inform Wooster of the defeat. Wooster left Hazen in command on March 20, 1776, as he left to replace Arnold in leading further attacks on Quebec City. On April 19, Arnold arrived in Montreal to take over command from Hazen, who remained as his second-in-command. Hazen sent Colonel Timothy Bedel to form

26880-432: Was one of the inspirations for The Language Instinct . There has been debate about the explanatory adequacy of the theory. By 2015, the linguistic nativist views of Pinker and Chomsky had a number of challenges on the grounds that they had incorrect core assumptions and were inconsistent with research evidence from psycholinguistics and child language acquisition . The reality of Pinker's proposed language instinct, and

27048-415: Was slower and much more volatile, being subject to conscious judgments and attitudes. Following the cognitive revolution, and as a result of many of the principal discoveries to come out of the field of cognitive psychology, the discipline of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) evolved. Aaron T. Beck is generally regarded as the father of cognitive therapy , a particular type of CBT treatment. His work in

27216-476: Was the first of several books to combine cognitive science with behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology . It introduces the science of language and popularizes Noam Chomsky 's theory that language is an innate faculty of mind, with the controversial twist that the faculty for language evolved by natural selection as an adaptation for communication. Pinker criticizes several widely held ideas about language – that it needs to be taught, that people's grammar

27384-446: Was the first to use the form Montréal with reference to the entire region in 1575. Archaeological evidence in the region indicates that First Nations native people occupied the island of Montreal as early as 4,000 years ago. By the year AD 1000, they had started to cultivate maize . Within a few hundred years, they had built fortified villages. The Saint Lawrence Iroquoians , an ethnically and culturally distinct group from

27552-490: Was the largest municipality in British North America and the undisputed economic and cultural centre of Canada. In the 19th century, maintaining Montreal's drinking water became increasingly difficult with the rapid increase in population. A majority of the drinking water was still coming from the city's harbour, which was busy and heavily trafficked, leading to the deterioration of the water within. In

27720-579: Was the name for the settlement that appeared in all official documents until 1705, when Montreal appeared for the first time, although people referred to the "Island of Montreal" long before then. As part of the American Revolution , the invasion of Quebec resulted after Benedict Arnold captured Fort Ticonderoga in present-day upstate New York in May 1775 as a launching point to Arnold's invasion of Quebec in September . While Arnold approached

27888-461: Was unaware of the nature of the charges against Epstein, and that he engaged in an unpaid favor for his Harvard colleague Dershowitz, as he had regularly done. He stated in an interview with BuzzFeed News that he regrets writing the letter. Pinker says he never received money from Epstein and met with him three times over more than a dozen years, and said he could never stand Epstein and tried to keep his distance. Pinker's 1994 The Language Instinct

28056-487: Was unlikely since "some of the declines have occurred far too rapidly for them to be explicable by biological evolution, which has a speed limit measured in generations, but crime can plummet in a span of 15 years and some of these humanitarian reforms like eliminating slavery and torture occurred in, say, 50 years". Helga Vierich and Cathryn Townsend wrote a critical review of Pinker's sweeping "civilizational" explanations for patterns of human violence and warfare in response to

28224-414: Was −37.8 °C (−36 °F) on January 15, 1957, and the highest temperature was 37.6 °C (99.7 °F) on August 1, 1975, both at Dorval International Airport . Before modern weather record keeping (which dates back to 1871 for McGill), a minimum temperature almost 5 degrees lower was recorded at 7 a.m. on January 10, 1859, where it registered at −42 °C (−44 °F). Annual precipitation

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