Week 10 - Problem solving, reasoning, decision making

Question 1

Patient PF

Answer 1

• His right anterior prefrontal cortex was damaged due to a stroke
• Successful architect before the stroke
• He seemed perfectly normal and intelligent
• However, he lost his ability in architectural design

Question 2

Operator

Answer 2

An action that will transform the problem state into another problem state
start state -> operators -> goal state

Question 3

problem space

Answer 3

problem space consists of various states of the problem

Question 4

problem state

Answer 4

A representation of the problem in some degree of solution

Question 5

problem solving

Answer 5

searching a sequence of states in a problem space that goes from the start state to the goal state

Question 6

Three ways to acquire new operators?

Answer 6

• discovery
• direct instruction
• analogy/imitation

Question 7

Operator selection

Answer 7

1. backup avoidance
2. difference reduction
3. means-ends analysis

Question 8

backup avoidance

Answer 8

The tendency in problem solving to avoid operators that take one back to a
state already visited

Question 9

difference reduction

Answer 9

• The tendency in problem solving to select operators that eliminate a difference between the current state and the goal state
• It is a useful method, but not always optimal
• It only considers whether the next step is an improvement and not whether the larger plan will work

Question 10

Means-ends analysis

Answer 10

• creates a new subgoal to enable an operator to apply (an operator is not abandoned even if it cannot be applied immediately)
• identifies the biggest difference between the current state and the goal state and try to eliminate it first
• tower of hanoi problem

Question 11

Observations of Tower of Hanoi problem

Answer 11

• Difference reduction doesn’t allow you to solve the Tower of Hanoi problem
• People tend to adopt the difference reduction strategy first and then start using
  means-ends analysis when they try to solve the Tower of Hanoi problem
• Patients with prefrontal damage often have difficulty in making backward moves
  in the Tower of Hanoi problem
• They cannot maintain the goal in working memory very well

Question 12

problem presentation

Answer 12

• How states of a problem are represented has significant effects
• Successful problem solving depends on representing problems in a way appropriate operators can be applied

Question 13

Incubation effects

Answer 13

• The phenomenon that sometimes solutions to a particular problem come easier after a period of time in which one has ignored trying to solve the problem
• Incubation effects occur because people forget inappropriate ways of solving
  problems

Question 14

Silveira’s (1971) cheap-necklace problem

Answer 14

Three groups of participants (they all worked on the problem for 30 min)
* Control: continuous 30 min (55%)
* Group 1: interrupted by 30-min of other activities (64%)
* Group 2: interrupted by a 4-hour break (85%)

Question 15

four areas of human irrationailty

Answer 15

• Reasoning about conditionals
• Reasoning about quantifiers
• Reasoning about probabilities
• Decision making

Question 16

What is a conditional statement

Answer 16

• If A, then B
• An assertion that if an antecedent (A) is true, then a consequent (B) must be true

Question 17

Wason selection task

Answer 17

• If a card has a vowel on one side, then it has an even number on the other side
• Neither a vowel nor a consonant on the other side of 4 will falsify the rule
• only 10% of participants made the right combination choices

Question 18

Permission schema

Answer 18

performance on a selection task can be enhanced when the material has meaningful content

Question 19

Griggs and Cox (1982)

Answer 19

• if a person is drinking a beer, then the person must be over 19
• 74% of participants selected the logically correct combination

Question 20

Probabilistic interpretation

Answer 20

• people tend to select cards that will be informative under a probabilistic model, not a strict logical model
• If A, then B (B will probably occur when A occurs)

Question 21

Oaksford and Chater (1994) car task

Answer 21

• “If a car has a broken headlight, it will have a broken taillight.”
  Given four choices:
• cars with broken headlights
• cars without broken taillights
• cars without broken headlights
• cars with broken tailights
  first two are the logically correct choices

Question 22

probabilistic interpretation of the car task

Answer 22

• It is not logical, but informative choice
• We tend to interpret conditional statements on the basis of a probabilistic model, not a strict logical model
• because doing so actually makes sense in many situations in real life
• This might be one reason why making the correct (=logical) choice in the original
  Wason’s selection task is so difficult

Question 23

Prior probability

Answer 23

The probability that a statement is true before consideration of the evidence

Question 24

Posterior probability

Answer 24

• The probability that the statement is true after consideration of the evidence
• To calculate the posterior probability, you need to take into account:
• Prior probability (base rate)
• Evidence
• How reliable the evidence is
  Bayes’s theorem computes the posterior probability

Question 25

Base-rate neglect

Answer 25

people often fail to take base rates into account in making probability judgement

Question 26

Hammerton (1973) probability study

Answer 26

• Suppose you take a diagnostic test for a rare form of cancer
• Only 1 in 10,000 people has this cancer
• This cancer results in a positive test 95% of the time
• If a person does not have the cancer, the probability of a positive result is 5%

Question 27

Judgements of probability/frequency

Answer 27

We can be biased in our estimates of probabilities when we must rely on
factors such as memory and similarity judgements

Question 28

Tversky and Kahneman (1974) english words

Answer 28

Participants estimated the proportion of English words:
* that begin with k (e.g., kettle)
* with k in the third position
- They estimated that more words begin with k than have it in the third position
- 3x as many words have k in the third position than begin with k

Question 29

Decision making

Answer 29

subjective utility
- the subjective value someone places on something
- it usually forms a non-linear function
- the subjective value tends to decrease more steeply in negative direction