Chapter 8: Thinking, Reasoning & Language Flashcards
Thinking
any mental activity or processing of information
thinking includes
learning, remembering, previewing, communicating, believing and deciding
thinking =
cognitiion
We are all ________ ______
cognitive misers
what does a cognitive miser mean
invests as little energy as possible unless it’s necessary to do more
when can cognitive economy get us in trouble?
when it leads us to oversimplify
what do our minds use to increase our thinking efficency?
heuristics (mental short cuts)
what does cognitive economy allow us to do
simplify what we attend to and keep the information we need for decisions making manageable minimum
Cognitive economy was refered to by Gigerenzer and Goldstein as
fast and frugal thinking
are heuristics effective?
yes
- a study by Samuel gosling revealed untrained observers make surprising accurate judgements
can you detect people personality from facebook profiles?
yes, some studys have found this
can you tell a persons personality from there online gamers’ avartars and player names
people are less likely to be able to
- suggests that gamer profiles are who they want to be perceived as vs. who they actually are
Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal
showed participants 30-second silent clips and asked to evaluate them on instructors nonverbal behaviours
participants ratings where correlated significantly with the teachers end of course evaluations by students
representativeness heuristics
involves judging the probability of an event based on how prevalent the event has been in the past
representativeness heuristics example
meeting someone shy, awkward, and a tournament chess player, and assuming they are more likely to be a mathematics major than a psychology major
base rate =
how common a behaviour or characteristics is in general
availability heuristics
estimate the occurrence based on how easy it come to our minds or how “available” it is in our memories
availability heuristics example
which has more calories beer or peanuts?
most people answer beer because the idea that beer is high in calories is prevalent in our society when in reality peanuts actually have more calories
Hindsight Bias is also known as
the “ I knew it all along effect”
Hindsight Bias
our tendency to overestimate how accurately we could have predicted something happening once we know the outcome
Hindsight bias example
“Monday Morning Quarterbacking”
- when commentators and spectators of a football game played sunday evening point out the fact that a different strategy would have worked better
conformation bias
tendency to seek out evidence that supports our hypotheses or beliefs and deny, dismiss, or distort evidence that does
top down processing
brain only processes information that it recieves, and constructs meaning from it slowly and surely by building up understanding from expereice
applications of top down processing
sensation
chunking
concepts
knowledge and ideas about objects, actions, and characteristics that share core properties
Shemas
concepts we’ve sorted in memory about how certain actions, objects, and ideas relate to each other
- allow us to know roughly what to expect in a given situation
lingustic determinism
- provides an extreme verson of top down processing in which no ideas can be generated without lingustic knowledge
can though occur without language
yes
lingustice relativity
- maintain and shape our thought processes
linguistic relativity is also called
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
color categorization
regardless of how many colors the language has, most people around the world precieve colors as dividing them into roughly the same color categories (Correlation)
what is higher order cognition?
making decions and problem solving
higher order thinking requires
taking ALL the basic aspects of cognitions, such as perception, knowledge, memory, language, and reasoning, and integrate them to generate a plan of action
decision making
the process of selecting among a set of alternatives
system 1 thinking
rapid; intuitive
- relies of heustrinsics
system 2 thinking
slow; analytical
additional factors that influence our decsion making and are known by marketing researchers, advertising exectives, and political pollsters are known as
framing
framing
how we formulate the question about what we need to decide
neuroeconomics
how the brain works while making financial decisions
- uses an fMRI to identify areas of the brain that have become active during this decision making
decision making activates areas of the brain involved in ___________ and _________
processign reward
attending carefully to the relative merits of different opinions
neuroeconimics has the potential to help us understand
why decision making goes wrong some of the time in some people
EXAMPLE: could be used to diagnose psychological disorders
problem solving
generating a cognitive strategy to accomplish a goal
algorithm
step-by-step learned procedure used to solve a problem
algorithms are used got
problems that depend on the basic steps for arriving at a solution
algorithms example
recipes
how can we problem solve
1.algorithms
2.breaking down problem into subproblems so they are easier to solve
3. reasoning from related examples
4. analogies
reasoning from related example
oil is often substituted for butter in baking therefore it might work form an omelette too
analogies
solve problems with similar structure
what are the obstacles to problem solving
- salience of surface similarities
- mental sets
- functional fixedness
mental set
phenomenon of being stuck in a specific problem solving strategy, inhibiting our ability to generate alternatives
functional fixedness
difficultly conceptualizing that an object typically used for one purpose can be used for another
solution to functional fixedness
shift the problem to be smaller
1980s analogy for how the mind works
compaired the mind to a computer
Language
largely arbitrary system of communication that combines symbols in rule based ways to create meaning
what is one hallmark of language
needs to be arbitary; its sounds, words, and sentences bear no clear relation to their meaning
what is the most crucial function of language
transmission of information