Cognition - Thinking and Consciousness Flashcards
What are the differences between judgements and decision making?
Judgements – assess likelihood, confidence etc; acts as a basis for decisions
Decision making – choosing from several alternatives; leads to action or inaction
What is base rate neglect?
(Kahneman and Tversky, 1972)
Base rate = prevalence of a disease in a population ie 1/1000; therefore 5% false positive rate = 50/1000 test +ve in error compared to 1 true positive; therefore the chances of being diagnosed with a false positive = 50x greater than a true positive = 2% (not 95% as many presume)
What are heuristics?
(Kahneman and Tversky, 2002)
Use of common information when making a decision, ‘rules of thumb’ – because they are cognitively undemanding, help us make rapid decisions (but means we are prone to errors)
Independent of intelligence – generally applicable
Some mistakes may arise due to misinterpretation of problem ie through language confusion
What is the conjunction fallacy?
The combination of two characteristics CANNOT be more likely than one of them on its own; a product of the representativeness heuristic ( = assessment of similarity of objects and organising them based around the category prototype - in this way people make false judgements as just because something is more representative, doesnt make it more likely, people overestimate accuracy of their own predictions)
What is support theory?
When estimating frequency of events, it depends on how easy the information is to retrieve from memory (you may not be able to recall all the relevant details) and the description attached to the question can significantly influence the answer you give – attention can be drawn to specific events that are less obvious when not made explicit
What is anchoring and adjustment?
(Bar-Hillel, 1973)
Initial values/information scaffolds your future decisions e.g. estimation
What are biases?
Errors of thinking – the neglect of information leading to thinking being not as rational as it could be
Some can stem from heuristics
What is hindsight bias?
In retrospect – things seem more predictable than they actually were at the time; without outcome knowledge – educated guesses are made from lots of options; with outcome knowledge – uncertain events seem predictable/inevitable (Fischhoff, 1975)
What is survivorship bias?
Only taking into account cases (people, aircraft etc) which survived some process and so ignoring failures ie Steve Jobs was a dropout and did fine therefore so can I; the planes came back with the most holes in the fuselage so I should reinforce there (Abraham Wald said no – reinforce the engines as the fewest planes returned)
What is deductive reasoning?
The ability to draw conclusions with some certainty, based on a series of statements assumed to be true; people frequently fail to do this so resort to heuristics (and are subject to subsequent biases); often failures in tasks are due to the abstract nature of the tasks, when real world examples are given – can improve
What is a modus ponens?
If A then B + given A, we can validly infer B
Example: premises – if my partner is angry, I am upset; my partner is angry – am I upset? (yes)
What is affirmation of the consequent?
If A then B + given B, can we validly infer A?
Example: premises – if my partner is angry, I am upset; I am upset – is my partner angry? (unknown)
What is modus tollens?
If A then B, given not B – we can validly infer not A
Example: premises – if my partner is angry, I am upset; I am not upset – is my partner angry? (no)
Also Chernobyl disaster (Johnson Laird 1999)
What is denial of the antecedent?
If A then B + given not A, can we validly infer B?
Example: premises – if my partner is angry, I am upset; my partner not angry – am I upset? (unknown)
What is consciousness? (Searle 1999)
Different from attention – can be conscious of what is unattended and unconscious of what is attended
Different from self-consciousness – consciousness = broader, encompasses feeling pain
Generally unobservable by others – can only see behaviours, also think aloud protocol
A subjective and qualitative experience
epiphenomenal/emergent/effective/fundamental???
