H10 Solving problems: reasoning and intelligence Flashcards
What are analogies?
What do scientists and nonscientists use analogies for?
In which 2 situations are they commonly used in?
Which brain areas are involved?
What neural changes happen after extensive practice with analogies?
Similarities in behavior, functions, or relationships in otherwise different entities or situations. They are a basis for reasoning.
Make sense of observations and generate new hypotheses.
Legal and political persuasion. Useful to compare new or complicated issues to familiar or less complicated issues. Reasoning is useful to the degree that structural relationships in the anlogies hold true; it is misleading to the degee that those relationships don’t hold true.
PFC. Anterior left inferior PFC in semantic decisions; multiple areas in analogical decisions. Extensive practice using analogies can alter brain structure (change in distribution of white matter = myelinated axons).
What is inductive reasoning or hypothesis construction?
Are we generally good or bad at inductive reasoning? What are 3 biases that affect inductive reasoning?
Is true scientific reasoning a form of inductive reasoning?
A new principle or proposition is inferred on the basis of specific observations or facts. Also called hypothesis construction, because the infered proposition is at best an educated guess. Use of analogies is a form of inductive reasoning.
We are generally good at inductive reasoning but are susceptible to certain biases:
1. Availability bias: tendency to give too much weight to information that comes more easily to mind than to other relevant information.
2. Confirmation bias: leads us to try to confirm rather than disconfirm our current hypothesis. Logically, a hypothesis cannot be proven, only disproven. This bias is not related to intelligence.
3. Predictable world bias: leads us to arrive at predictions through induction even when events are actually random. Adaptive function: advantage of seeking order may outweigh disadvantage of developing superstitions or mistaken beliefs.
Especially gamblers are prone to this.
Yes
What is reasoning?
What is intelligence?
Process by which we use our memories in adaptive ways. To a large extent, we reason by using our memories of previous experiences to make sense of present experiences or to plan the future.
Capacity to reason, solving problems, acquiring new knowledge.
Sternberg: mental activities necessary for adaptation to, as well as shaping and selecting of, any new environmental context… Intelligence is not just reactive to the environment but also active in forming it. It offers people an opportunity to respond flexibly to challenging situations.
What are 5 things that educators can do to support students to make analogical comparisons?
- Provide opportunities to make comparisons between newly learned concepts and previously learned ones.
- Present source and target analogies simultaneously so that student may visualize ways in which they are related
- Provide additional cues, such as geestures, that move between the two contexts being compared in order to highlight analogical mappings
- Hihlight both the similarities and differences between sources and targets. If the difference can lead to an incorrect inference, indicate explicitly where the analogy breaks down.
- Use relational language to facilitate attenetion to shared relationships
What is maximizing and matching in gambling?
Related to pedictable world bias
Maximizing: Strategy in which in the long run you maximize your winning. Hight IQ is related to choosing the maximizing strategy.
Matching: vary guesses over trials in a way that matches the probability that red and green will show.
What 2 things contribute to problem solving ability?
And what are their definitions?
- Deduction: Derivation of conclusions that must be true if the premises are true. = mathtematics. Deduction is a form of effortful slow thinking.
- Insight: sudden solutions come from seeing things in a new way
- What are classic examples of deductive-reasoning problems?
- What do older theories vs newer theories say about solving such problems?
- Syllogisms: pesents a major premise, or proposition, and a minor premise that you must combine mentally to see if a particular conclusion is true, false or indeterminate.
- That we solve it with formal logic/mental algebra, whereas newer theories recognize that we are biased toward using content knowledge even when told not to. This is a bias for thinking inductively rathe than deductively.
What is the candle problem and what is it used for?
Study insight.
What does our tendency to see tools as designed for a specific purpose lead to = design stance (2x)?
- Functional fixedness. May be an adaptation, namely point 2.
- More efficient use of tools (at the cost of some flexibility)
What 2 things is insight often derived from?
What 2 things could it also be promoted by?
- Abandoning a mental set: habitual way of thinking or perceiving
- Paying attention to aspects of the problem and materials that might otherwise be overlooked
- Incubation period: assumption is that during incubation the person is unconsciously reorganizing the material related to the problem while consciously doing and thinking about other things. Incubation does not help with deduction.
- Happy or playful frame of mind
How is deductive reasoning different from inductive reasoning?
Inductive reasoning is reasoned guesswork, deductive reasoning is logical proof, assuming that the premises realy are true
What is deontic reasoning?
Reasoning about what one may, should or ought to do.
Why is it easier for people to solve problems stated in terms of relationships people know, particularly those involving social rules, than problems stated in numbers?
- Familiarity; reflects deontic reasoning
- Humans have developed cheater detectors, because humans evolved to be sensitive to be cheated on when dealing with others
Does insight entail inductive or deductive reasoning?
Both
- What evidence suggests that solving insight problems is qualitatively different from deductive reasoning?
- Does insight involve fast or slow thinking? And deduction?
- How might mental priming be involved in achieving insight?
- People’s ability to solve insight problems but not their ability to solve syllogisms correlated positively with their creativity, measured by their ability to think of clever titles for jokes.
- Working-memory capacity which correlated positively with the ability to solve deductive reasoning problems did not correlate at all with the ability to achieve insight in insight problems.
- Insight: unconscious fast mental processes
Deduction: conscious slow thinking - During incubation all of the elementary concepts related to an unsovled problem may remain primed, even though the peson is not consciously thinking about them. As the person goes about othe activities and thinks about other things, some of those primed concepts may form new associations and eventually some new association may create a solution.
- What evidence suggests that happiness and playfulness help to solve insight problems?
- According to the broaden and build theory, how do positive emotions differ from negative emotions in their effects on perception and thought?
1.1. People are better at solving insight problems if they are made to feel happy than if they are in a serious or somber mood. Play is a time when people regularly view objects and information in new ways.
- Negative emotions tend to narrow one’s focus or perception and thought > lead them to focus only on the specific emotion evoking objects and to think only of routine, well-learned ways of responding.
Positive emotions are felt when thee is no imminent danger and one’s immediate biological needds are relatively well satisfied. That is the time to think creatively; this is adaptive because the new ideas may prove useful in satisfying future needs or preventing future emergencies.
What are 2 cultural differences in perception and reasoning?
1 for non-westerners and 1 for east asians/young children
- Non-Westerners who lack formal schooling apply rules of logic that are more closely tied to everyday, practical function than to abstract concepts/taxonomy (e.g. in the problem of who is taller, they might say: I’m sorry, I have never met these people; and: in ax-log-shovel-saw, shovel is out of place instead of log).
- East Asian subjects tend to focus on the entire context of a problem or situation, as do very young children in both Western and East Asian cultures. Around 6 years old Western children become socialized to focus their attention, while East Asian children become sociolized to divide their attention.
- How did Binet regard intelligence?
2. What did his tests use?
- As a loose set of higher-order mental abilities that are nurtured in interaction with the environment andcan be increased by schooling.
- His tests used school-related questions and problems.