W9 - Thinking and decison making

Question 1

salience bias

Answer 1

assessing something as more prevalent if it comes to mind very readily.

Question 2

Darley and Gross (1983): showed participants a video of an poor vs rich person being tested

Answer 2

someone from a poor background is going to be reported as having more bad answers associated with them.
- This is not just stereotyping
- Instead it’s about where you focus your attention
- Raters attended more to evidence confirming their expectations.

Question 3

Research: testing favourite theory

Answer 3

focus on evidence that confirms their theory and ignores any evidence against it.

Question 4

Clinic: understanding the cause of distress

Answer 4

asking questions that confirm their hypothesis and not those that might challenge it.

Question 5

Heuristics

Answer 5

quick rules of thumb that work well in most situations

Question 6

The Availability Heuristic

Answer 6

This is the core principle underlying the salience bias.
it is the tendency to assess outcomes as more probable if they come to mind readily

Question 7

what is the diffrenace between logical thought and heuristic?

Answer 7

logiacl thought takes time and costs recources

Question 8

fast thinking

Answer 8

Heuristics and schemas

Question 9

slow thinking

Answer 9

goal-oriented thinking and open-ended reflection

Question 10

Schemas

Answer 10

mental knowledge structures based on experience (snow textures)

Question 11

Scripts

Answer 11

common action routines (going to a café)

Question 12

Thinking

Answer 12

A working definition: thinking is the conscious experience of generating mental representations and operating on them in some way.

• Often experienced as inner speech. (allows us to process problems in our heads)
• Can also involve images, music, action sequences or even complex scenarios.
• Makes up only a tiny fraction of all mental activity.

Question 13

costs of conscious thought are?

Answer 13

• Resource-intensive
• Requires effort, filtering out distractions

Question 14

Tip of the iceberg

Answer 14

mental processes reaching awareness

Question 15

Rest of the iceberg

Answer 15

cognitive processes beneath awareness

Question 16

what does thought look like?

Answer 16

When people are at rest in an fMRI scanner, a network of structures “talk” to each other.

Question 17

The Default Mode Network

Answer 17

what you do by default when we you aren’t engaging with the world.
- Mind wandering
- Integrating past and present
- Imagination, creative thinking, visualisation
- Creating scenarios for future actions, “episodic future thinking”

Question 18

The DMN: in a major depressive disorder the default network shows hyperconnectivity

Answer 18

• This occurs most when the mind is at rest
• Is causes less flexibility when switching between different modes of thinking

Question 19

two modes of thinking

Answer 19

• open-ended (reflection)
• goal-directed

Question 20

Goal-directed Thinking:

Answer 20

working memory tasks

Question 21

structures in the brain involved with goal-directed thinking

Answer 21

the lateral frontal cortex - is involved in goal-directed thinking
The medial = self-directed thought

Question 22

the name for the goal-directed thinking network

Answer 22

the “executive control” network

Question 23

the open-ended reflection network

Answer 23

the Defult Mode Network

Question 24

A Neuroscience Perspective on Thinking

Answer 24

• A “thought” is a pattern of activity across a widely dispersed range of brain areas
• At any one time, one pattern dominates
• For many tasks, we need to switch between states

Question 25

Micheal: damaged frontal lobe

Answer 25

• still intelligent= slove complex probelms
• poor judgemnt= financial decisions, impulsive relationships

Question 26

Hot Cognition

Answer 26

The mental processes involved in making judgements and decisions in situations
involving strong emotion
* Making choices based on preference (e.g., where to go for dinner)
* Responding appropriate in socially sensitive situations
* Understanding how other people might be feeling in a situation

Hot cognition can facilitate rapid decisions in these situations

Question 27

Hot Cognition and Decision Making

Answer 27

• People learn what decks to avoid even when not “aware” of the rule.
• They learn to associate losses with a “bad feeling”
• This guides them towards the safer card decks
• Those who can’t do this perform badly on the task

Question 28

Damasio’s Somatic Marker Hypothesis:
thinking and emotion

Answer 28

This brain region binds memories together with their emotional (and physiological) associations

Question 29

Hot Cognition and Social Inference-Making: what do people get wrong?

Answer 29

• find it hard to make decsions as they have no emotion base to go from
• wont find mean or insensitive comments hurtful
• cant read or understand sacasim
• have no empathy

Question 30

Emotions play a key role in judgement and decision-making, they:

Answer 30

• guide our choices
• shape our decisions
• facilitate inferences about others’ emotional states
• ensure we behave appropriately in social situations

Question 31

Brain activity during the Tower of London task: Working Memory

Answer 31

prefrontal cortex

key for probelm solving and inner speech

Question 32

deductive reasoning

Answer 32

involves working from premises and drawing conclusions based entirely on those premises.

used in tower task - probelm solving involoving the working memory

Question 33

inductive reasoning

Answer 33

is a bottom up process, starting with specific facts and trying to develop a general principle.

the principle involved in classical conditioning - Pavlov’s dog