Cognitive Psychology

Question 1

What are the tradeoffs of thinking for the human brain?

Answer 1

• Humans have natural tendency to try to understand events and people and try to solve problems… but not too much
• Human brains balance the need for speed with quality and accuracy whereas computers have a rigid way of processing things
• Suitable for most situations (daily interaction needs speed; eg. what to eat at lunch time, how to get to campus and back home)
• But sometimes can lead us to incorrect outcomes (eg. justifying procrastination by thinking too much)

Question 2

What is the definition of cognition?

Answer 2

Mental activities and processes associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating information

Question 3

What are concepts?

Answer 3

• Mental groupings of similar objects, events, states, ideas, and/or people (what we think about)
• We do not derive concepts from a definition that we have learned/memorized

Question 4

What are prototypes?

Answer 4

• Mental images of the best example of a concept within a category
• Allow for classification by ressemblance
• Explain why certain category members are recognized better
• For speed which can come at a cost

Question 5

When can prototypes fail us?

Answer 5

1. Examples stretch the qualities associated with the prototype
2. Boundary between categories of concepts is fuzzy
3. Examples contradict our prototypes

Question 6

What is categorization?

Answer 6

• Create categories of objects according to a certain set of rules of by a specific definition
• Fit to a category is determined by comparing a target to the prototype of the category

Question 7

What is problem solving? What are the types of problems?

Answer 7

• Thinking in order to answer a complex question or to figure out how to accomplish a goal when the solution or path to the solution is not clear

1. Well defined problems (eg. “I’m cold”)
2. Ill-defined problems (eg. “I need to find a topic for my paper”)

Question 8

What are algorithms?

Answer 8

• A step by step strategy for solving a problem, methodically leading to a specifc solution (eg. formulas, manuals)
• Aims to guarantee 1 specific solution, provided that algorithm is appropriate for problem
• Quality > speed

Question 9

What are heuristics?

Answer 9

• Mental shortcuts that give some guidance on what to do to solve a problem
• Uses some pieces of puzzle (not having to process all the necessary information) to help generate solutions quickly
• Does not guarantee solutions consistently
• Speed > quality

Question 10

What is the issues with heuristics?

Answer 10

1. Representativeness heuristic: judgement of likelihood based on the similarity or relationship with a particular category
   - Eg. what is the match between the picture and the prototype I have for each of these categories
2. Availability heuristic: judgement of the frequency of an event based on how easily we can think of examples
   - Eg. medical doctors see a lot of common cold and someone comes in with the symptoms of the common cold, will diagnose common cold even if it might need more assessments for more serious problems

Question 11

What is the confirmation bias? How do you avoid it?

Answer 11

• Tendency to search for information which confirms our current explanations (hypotheses, theories), disregarding contradictory evidence
• Solution: try to falsify the hypothesis instead of confirming, challenge your understanding of the world
• Objective observations, critically thinking

Question 12

What is fixation?

Answer 12

• The tendency to get stuck in one way of thinking, often because of how we understand concepts
• Limits our ability to think a problem/solution from a new perspective or think outside of the box
• Allowed us to survive because usually the problem solving methods work well

Question 13

What is overconfidence?

Answer 13

• Tendency to be more confident about thinking than correct, overestimate the accuracy of our estimates, predictions, and knowledge
• Occurs due to speed, managing uncertainty (reduce uncertainty about reality if you use biases), and gain power/authority

Question 14

What is language?

Answer 14

Use of symbols to represent, transmit, and store meaning/information

Question 15

Why is language important?

Answer 15

• Storing information
• Sharing information
• Understanding others
• Allows society to progress and learn from previous mistakes, built from previous generations’ knowledge that they communicate

Question 16

What is linguistic determinism?

Answer 16

• The idea that our specific language determines how we think (you can’t say it then you can’t think about it)
• Modern psychology says that you can think about something you don’t have a word for, it’s just harder

Eg. same people filled out same survey in Chinese and English, reported less self-esteem in the Chinese survey (change how you see the world depending on what language you use)

Eg. humour does not translate well

Question 17

What is the bilingual advantage?

Answer 17

• People who are bilingual have greater number of synapses and greater executive control
• Decreases risk for Alzheimer’s/Parkinson’s?
• Eg. Canada has a French immersion program because of Dr. Wallace Lambert to make people smarter
• If you learn another language after 7 years old, then you will always have an accent

Question 18

What is graded membership?

Answer 18

Observation that some concepts appear to make better category members than others

Question 19

What is sentence-verification technique?

Answer 19

Volunteers wait for sentence to appear in front of them on computer screen and respond as fast as they can, some members of category are recognized better than others

Question 20

What are semantic networks?

Answer 20

Interconnected set of nodes/concepts and links that join to form category

Concept map

Question 21

What are hierarchies?

Answer 21

Basic-level categories are terms used most often in conversation, easiest to pronounce, level at which prototype exists, at which most thinking occurs
Superordinate categories: vague word used when someone is uncertain about object
Subordinate ccategories: specific word

Question 22

How are experiences linked?

Answer 22

Our ability to form categories is based on experiences

We retrieve individual’s features faster than entire object from memory

Question 23

What are cognitive obstacles?

Answer 23

• Mental set: occurs when individual attempts to apply a routine solution to what is actually a new type of problem
• Functional fixedness: individual identifies an object or technique that could potentially solve a problem, but can think of only its most obvious function

Question 24

What is conjunction fallacy?

Answer 24

Mistaken belief that finding a specific member in two overlapping categories is more likely than finding a member of one of the larger, general categories

Question 25

What is anchoring effect?

Answer 25

Occurs when individual attempts to solve a problem involving numbers and uses previous knowledge to keep the response within a limited range

Question 26

What is belief perseverance?

Answer 26

Individual believes he/she has solution to problem or correct answer for question and accepts only evidence that will confirm those beliefs